Greg Freeman at YES

There’s something happening in American indie rock at the moment – though nobody quite agrees what to call it. To some, it’s just good old alt-country. Others are keener on Countrygaze. It’s actually country-adjacent, according to the genre’s diehards, who’d rather it stayed well off their front porch. In any case, MJ Lenderman remains its most recognisable name, alongside relative veterans Wednesday and Waxahatchee. But there are a bunch of smaller acts doing some of the most interesting work. In the same loose – really loose – constellation as This Is Lorelei, Florry and Lily Seabird, Greg Freeman is an interesting one, mining local history for character-driven tales of violence, loss and epiphany.

Burnover, his second album, borrows its title from “The Burned-Over District” – a part of upstate New York that became a hotbed of religious revival and utopian communities during the early 19th century. Freeman found his way into that history on long Vermont drives, passing the birthplaces of Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, and Ethan Allen, the Revolutionary War figure and Vermont folk hero, and becoming drawn to what he calls “slightly tragic regional figures” who explain the place better than he could himself. The complicated people who live in these songs are all searchers of one kind or another, trying to make sense of a landscape that’s stopped being theirs, if it ever was.

He has a gift for the specific image that makes the abstract suddenly legible: “Light spent your life wrapping all around you / And always finding your form / And now it drifts like some blind-drunk salesmen / Looking for your door to door.” In “Gone”, Rensselaer becomes the site of a quiet linguistic unravelling: “Down in Rensselaer, nothing’s quite clear / You can cross the plane, but gone can mean a lot of things.” The nine-minute closer “Wolf Pine” is built around a single real Burlington tree old enough to have lived through all of it, and so tell the ragged history of Freeman’s adopted home – the native Abenaki people, the volcanic winter that killed the region’s crops in 1816, and the upheavals that followed.

The songs move in loud-quiet surges: ragged guitar, pedal steel, Wurlitzer, harmonica, horns and Freeman’s plainspoken, cracked vocal delivery, with Burlington regulars – including Lily Seabird, his closest collaborator – filling out the arrangements. But Burnover is stranger than that list of ingredients suggests. The record keeps turning local history into something physical: guitars burst through like headlights on a dark road, pedal steel hangs around the edges like a half-memory, and by the time saxophone and distortion start crowding the frame, these songs feel less like alt-country revivalism than a haunted map of upstate New York and Vermont.

Freeman last played Manchester at YES Basement, in September 2025; this time it’s the Pink Room – a fair measure of how quickly the audience here is growing. If he follows anything like the same trajectory as Lenderman and co, this could be your last chance to catch him in a room this small.