Jay Buchanan – frontman of American rock band Rival Sons – has announced his debut solo album, Weapons Of Beauty, is set for release on 6 February 2026 via Sacred Tongue Records / Thirty Tigers. The news arrives alongside the new single Caroline and a striking video filmed in an abandoned gold mine.
“As music continues to be choked out by technology,” Jay Buchanan says, “I wanted to draw pictures in the dirt. Weapons Of Beauty is the sound of these plates shifting within me, too loud to ignore. Surprisingly, I’ve never known a vulnerability to feel so empowering.”
Jay Buchanan disappeared to the Mojave Desert for three months to write, living simply in a small underground bunker, powered by a gas generator and writing by firelight near abandoned mines.
That isolation shaped songs about longing, endurance and a hard-won sense of renewal that runs throughout the record. Opening track Caroline is a spare, aching letter to a lost home or lover, introducing a theme of return and forgiveness.
The Caroline video, filmed in the same Mojave gold mines, follows a couple through sickness and health while Buchanan performs as their memories are projected on the cave walls. “Spending twelve hours deep in the earth, trying to mine our own treasure… that’s a hell of a way to spend a Sunday,” he says.
The album’s sequencing was handled by acclaimed filmmaker Scott Cooper, who directed Buchanan in the recent Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere, in which the singer appeared as the frontman of the Stone Pony house band.
“On the flight home after the film wrapped,” Jay Buchanan says, “Scott and I had a conversation that stayed with me as I went directly to the desert. I don’t want to get too personal, but we were kind of living on opposite sides of the same coin that day, and he was the last person I spoke to before my desert exile.
“Months later, the night the record was finished, when I listened to the playback for the first time, I immediately thought of him sequencing it. The whole undertaking had left me so raw that the pan was just too hot for me to pick up. I knew I could trust him, if he’d help me.”
Spanning ten tracks, Weapons Of Beauty traces Jay Buchanan through the sun-bleached dust of an American-gothic wilderness.
The cover artwork comes from lauded American realist painter Jeremy Lipking. “Jeremy Lipking is an old friend and family on my wife’s side,” Buchanan says. “We’ve been wanting to work together forever. He was the only person to hear some of my demos direct from the desert.
“I told him I was writing a Jeremy Lipking painting. It was important to me that the music have a scenic quality — the America I’ve seen over decades of touring: lonesome sunsets, big-clouded skies, silhouetted by our dreams and failures.”
Formats include CD (4-panel Digipak with 8-panel poster), standard black vinyl (gatefold jacket with gold foil and printed inner sleeve), and a D2C exclusive Mojave marble vinyl with an autographed photo while supplies last. Pre-orders are available from 30tgrs.ffm.to/weaponsofbeauty.
Spanning ten tracks, Weapons Of Beauty traces Jay Buchanan through the sun-bleached dust of an American-gothic wilderness. “I suppose that writing about unquenchable grief allows you a kind of permission to pay respect to those deep chasms in your life without wallowing in them,” Buchanan says. “Putting it in a song lets you buy the ticket and take the ride — and then move on.”
The post
Jay Buchanan Of Rival Sons Announces Debut Solo Album Weapons Of Beauty first appeared on
MetalTalk - Heavy Metal News, Reviews and Interviews.
