Middle
Jesse Welles
Middle is the third studio album from Northwest Arkansas-born singer-songwriter Jesse Welles, released on February 21, 2025 and produced by Eddie Spear — whose recent credits include Sierra Ferrell's Grammy-winning Trail of Flowers and Zach Bryan's American Heartbreak. Welles had built a substantial following through a prolific stream of socially and politically engaged "fast folk" videos on social media, synthesizing current events into sharply crafted songs in near real time. Middle represents a deliberate pivot away from that topical immediacy toward something more expansive and philosophical — zooming out from the news cycle to address broader questions of God, war, religion, self-doubt, and the war between the ego and the rational mind. The result is his most fully formed studio record, pairing the rootsy earthen sound of Americana with melodies whose construction is as carefully considered as any of his viral material.
The twelve-track, 45-minute album opens with "Horses," whose plaintive fiddle line draws immediate comparisons to Dylan's "Hurricane" — the album's most Dylan-esque moment in a record that wears its influences openly. "Certain" delivers one of the album's sharpest lyrical observations — "You'll become what you hate if you seek to replace what you hate" — while "Fear Is the Mind Killer," "Anything But Me," and "Every Grain of Sand" find Welles wrestling with self-determination and the weight of an examined life in a more introspective register than his social media work typically allows. "War Is a God" considers humankind's capacity for violence with a resigned gravity, and the album-closing title track — placing Marc Bolan's folk impulses in the middle of Heart of Darkness — brings the record to a quietly defiant close. Saving Country Music called it "nothing short of Dylan-esque" and "an album that illustrates that Jesse Welles is not just the guy that posts viral videos about current events — he can work in nuance," while PopMatters noted it "feels like Welles' first fully formed effort," with both new and longtime fans finding something to hold onto in its balance of the personal and the political.
Middle
Jesse Welles
Middle is the third studio album from Northwest Arkansas-born singer-songwriter Jesse Welles, released on February 21, 2025 and produced by Eddie Spear — whose recent credits include Sierra Ferrell's Grammy-winning Trail of Flowers and Zach Bryan's American Heartbreak. Welles had built a substantial following through a prolific stream of socially and politically engaged "fast folk" videos on social media, synthesizing current events into sharply crafted songs in near real time. Middle represents a deliberate pivot away from that topical immediacy toward something more expansive and philosophical — zooming out from the news cycle to address broader questions of God, war, religion, self-doubt, and the war between the ego and the rational mind. The result is his most fully formed studio record, pairing the rootsy earthen sound of Americana with melodies whose construction is as carefully considered as any of his viral material.
The twelve-track, 45-minute album opens with "Horses," whose plaintive fiddle line draws immediate comparisons to Dylan's "Hurricane" — the album's most Dylan-esque moment in a record that wears its influences openly. "Certain" delivers one of the album's sharpest lyrical observations — "You'll become what you hate if you seek to replace what you hate" — while "Fear Is the Mind Killer," "Anything But Me," and "Every Grain of Sand" find Welles wrestling with self-determination and the weight of an examined life in a more introspective register than his social media work typically allows. "War Is a God" considers humankind's capacity for violence with a resigned gravity, and the album-closing title track — placing Marc Bolan's folk impulses in the middle of Heart of Darkness — brings the record to a quietly defiant close. Saving Country Music called it "nothing short of Dylan-esque" and "an album that illustrates that Jesse Welles is not just the guy that posts viral videos about current events — he can work in nuance," while PopMatters noted it "feels like Welles' first fully formed effort," with both new and longtime fans finding something to hold onto in its balance of the personal and the political.