India Ramey’s fans have taken to calling her “the Woman in Black” — even “the Wednesday Addams of country music” — and on her sixth studio album, she’s decided that’s not an insult, it’s a mission statement. Villain Era, out now via Copaco Records/Blue Élan, picks up where 2024’s Baptized By The Blaze left off: a record about trauma, healing, and survival, followed now by one about what comes after all that — boundaries, and the refusal to apologize for having them.
Ramey left Nashville for the first time to record the album in Los Angeles with two-time Grammy-nominated producer Eric Corne, chasing a sound she described wanting to feel like Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn rising from the grave to score a Quentin Tarantino film. Written entirely by Ramey and released May 8, the ten-song set brought in a heavyweight band to build out that spaghetti-western-meets-honky-tonk sound — guitarists Eugene Edwards (Dwight Yoakam) and Chris Masterson (The Wallflowers), fiddler Eleanor Whitmore (Steve Earle), and bassist Ted Russell Kamp among them.
The record kicks off with “We Ride At Dawn,” a spaghetti-western scene where a group of women hunt down the outlaws who tore through their town — Ramey stakes her ground before the first chorus even lands. The title track, “Welcome To My Villain Era,” carries that same nerve into fiddle-driven, honky-tonk-mean territory, finished with being anyone’s doormat. “If my boundaries offend you,” Ramey says, “I’ll happily play the villain in that story.” That defiance runs through “Six Feet Under,” where a haunting, Spanish-tinged melody adds a touch of noir, and “Scattered and Smothered,” a tongue-in-cheek Waffle House confession about a woman who loves a good man and still needs to break free.
Villain Era is out now wherever you stream, with the CD available direct from Blue Élan and on Bandcamp. Keep up with new tour dates and the rest of Ramey’s catalog at indiaramey.com. If her brand of gritty, unapologetic Americana is your speed, don’t miss our coverage of S.G. Goodman, another fierce roots voice worth your time. And if Baptized By The Blaze introduced you to Ramey’s fire, this one shows you what she built with it.
A curated pick by Planet Mars Music Editorial Staff and crafted with the help of AI