American Aquarium Cut 'New Ways to Lose' Live in 10 Days With Shooter Jennings. It Sounds Like It.

American Aquarium has spent twenty years being the band that should be bigger than it is, and BJ Barham has spent most of that time writing like he knows it. New Ways to Lose, out today on Barham's own Losing Side Records, leans all the way into that hunger. It is ten songs cut mostly live in Los Angeles over ten days, produced again by Shooter Jennings, and it sounds like a band that walked into the room already knowing the parts and wanting to get them on tape before the feeling cooled off.

That last part matters. Jennings, a multiple Grammy winner who has now made several records with this band, ran the sessions loose and fast, chasing the take over the polish. You can hear it. The album has the shoulders-forward energy of the live show, the thing fans drive across state lines for, and the overdubs that did get layered on, three-part harmonies and horn charts, push instead of decorate.

The pitch is small-town wreckage

Barham builds the record around the same territory Springsteen and Mellencamp were working forty years ago: factory towns that emptied out, the people who stayed, the math that never adds up. Opener "Dollar General" sets the whole thing in motion over a pulsing rhythm, Barham sketching a town that lost its plant in 1993 and never recovered. "Even the Dollar General is closing down," he sings, "we'd fix it if we could, but we don't know how." It is a blunt image, and he means it to be.

The lead single "History Repeats Itself" is the most pointed swing, a piano-driven number aimed at the kind of fast, cheap gentrification that hollows a place out while pretending to save it. "Little men in ill-fitting suits, making the decisions for me and you," Barham sings. "Get the money, get out of town. Be long gone before it all falls down." It is the song the band put out first, and it is also the most produced moment here, which makes it land cleaner than it cuts. The deeper material hits harder.

The personal stuff is where it bites

For all the civic anger, the songs that stick are the ones aimed inward. "Twin Flames" is a love song for Barham's wife, and the band does the smart thing by refusing to play it soft, wrapping the sentiment in a brass arrangement that owes a clear debt to Clarence Clemons and the E Street Band. There is a song about losing a family dog that Rolling Stone flagged in its own feature as the one that will wreck you, and given how Barham writes about grief, that tracks. He has never been shy about putting the hard stuff on tape.

The title came from an unlikely place. NC State radio man Gary Hahn used to give the Wolfpack credit for finding new ways to lose, and Barham, a North Carolina lifer, heard his own band in it. "It's about trying so hard to win at something, but always finding a way to lose at it," he said. "We take our hits and we get back up, and we do what we do."

Where it sits in the run

This is not a band reinventing anything, and it is not trying to. American Aquarium owns its publishing, runs its own festival, and answers to nobody, and New Ways to Lose is the sound of a group comfortable in exactly the lane it built. Americana UK, which handed the band's 2020 album Lamentations a rare 10 out of 10, gave this one a 9 and called it another hugely impressive release. The knock, if you want one, is that the loud-bar-band mode can blur together across ten tracks when Barham is not handing you a piano line or a horn section to grab onto. The album knows this, which is why those arrangements show up exactly when the energy needs a turn.

Barham has a line about all this that doubles as a thesis. "All of my records are yearbooks," he said. "Twenty years from now, I'll pull them off the shelf and remember exactly who I was when I wrote them." New Ways to Lose is a good yearbook. It remembers a guy who is still angry about the right things and still writing toward the people who never left.

Track list: Dollar General, Can't Into Could, 4x60, Twin Flames, Out There In the Dark, History Repeats Itself, Favorite Hello, Whatever Helps You Sleep At Night, Just Like You, Bad Habits.