When Margo Price played Saturday Night Live just two weeks after the release of her debut album (on the tail end of an all-night bender and strep throat diagnosis), and then earned a GRAMMY nomination for Best New Artist (iconically walking the red carpet six months pregnant), she launched an unprecedented movement in the world of alternative country music. To this day, the waves she created, the boats she rocked and people she pissed off continue to impact the genre’s mainstream resurgence, yet she likens it to a toxic ex-boyfriend: “Have you ever loved somebody or something so much but you got the feeling they didn’t love you back?”

While Price has uplifted and collaborated with generations of fellow stars, from legends like Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, John Prine, Mavis Staples, Loretta Lynn and Lucinda Williams to Chris Stapleton, Jack White, Sturgill Simpson, Sierra Ferrell, Orville Peck and Billy Strings – she has remained an outlaw to the bone. Fearlessly pushing herself to search for new sounds, places and people, embrace different communities and lay her truths bare, you never know what the next Margo Price record will sound like.

Arriving this summer, Hard Headed Woman is Margo Price at her wisest, funniest, toughest and most vulnerable. Reunited with Midwest Farmer’s Daughter and All American Made producer Matt Ross-Spang, it’s at once edgy and traditional, authentic and full of attitude. It is the first album she fully recorded in Nashville – at the legendary RCA Studio A – tracking everything live in the same room as her band, performing as one single, breathing organism. With four LPs and a memoir under her belt, Hard Headed Woman is her best-written, hardest-won and most honest work to date, doubling down on a refusal to conform, and all the other traits that make her distinctly, unmistakably Margo Price.

Hard Headed Woman’s opening statement, “Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down,” is a smoking gun of a song, played by no one’s rules but her own. Though she hasn’t drank for years, it feels like a bookend to her hit “Hurtin’ (On The Bottle),” but with more brilliantly biting lyrics and witty turns-of-phrase than you can keep up with (“all the cocaine in existence, couldn’t keep your nose out of my business!”). The track has contributions from Rodney Crowell, pays respect to Price’s late friend and mentor, Kris Kristofferson, and keeps the listener gripped in her fist for the entire ride. It is the first page of her next chapter, further reckoning with that tumultuous love affair, and redefining the style of music that cemented her place as a generational storyteller.