Madison Cunningham

Madison Cunningham is such an adventurous songwriter that—after becoming one of music’s most acclaimed guitarists under 30—she set the instrument aside for swaths of her exceptional 2025 album, Ace. For Cunningham, after all, music has long been about steady reinvention. After asking to learn guitar starting at 4 years old, she finally began at 7, with her father teaching her the instrument just as his mother had. She rapidly began writing songs and, at age 17, began conducting the choir of her evangelical church, leading several singers many decades her senior. This was around the time, mind you, that Cunningham first deliberately heard The Beatles, an epiphany that ushered her toward a new kind of sacred music: sophisticated pop. Across three albums in only six years, she has emerged as a beguiling ace, her intricate guitar playing mirrored by a loamy voice capable of balletic highs.

Ace documents another set of significant changes for Cunningham. Always a candid if crafty songwriter (her Grammy-winning 2022 album, after all, was titled Revealer), Cunningham traces her young marriage, her descent into divorce, and her push beyond its wreckage across 14 songs. Borrowing from the baroque arrangements of Rufus Wainwright, the emotional impact of Elliott Smith, and the sophisticated layering of Jon Brion, Cunningham turns to the piano, strings, and rich rhythms to render these songs of loss and recovery. She does not turn away from the guitar entirely, of course; her playing on “Wake,” alongside Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, feels like a fantasy. It’s only that Cunnigham is still finding new ways to be one of the most enchanting classic songsmiths of her generation.