Kristina Murray To Appear at SXSW This Week, NEW RELEASE & TOUR
March 12 - July 27
Kristina Murray will release her Normatown/New West Records debut, Little Blue, on May 9, 2025. The 9-song set was produced by Misa Arriaga (Kacey Musgraves, Wyatt Flores) and Rachael Moore (T Bone Burnett’s longtime engineer). It was recorded in Muscle Shoals, AL & Nashville, TN, and features Logan Ledger and Erin Rae. Little Blue grapples with loneliness, desperation, and existential crises through a series of cinematic snapshots of small-town burnouts and last call lovers.
Murray is a country artist in the truest sense, a genuine craftswoman with a keen eye and ear for the little details that bring her working-class characters to life, and her delivery is timeless, blurring the lines between the old school honky-tonk, swampy Americana, and R&B-infused southern rock she grew up with. The spirit of perseverance forms the bedrock of Little Blue, and if Murray sounds like a seasoned vet, that’s because she is. While the album marks her Normaltown/New West debut, she has spent the last decade paying her Nashville dues in an endless series of dive bars and juke joints. The result is an electrifying introduction to an artist only just beginning to get the kind of wider recognition her talent has long warranted.
Murray has announced her initial tour dates in support of Little Blue. Prior to her album release celebration on May 9th at the newly opened Skinny Dennis in Nashville, TN, she will appear at this year’s SXSW Music Festival in Austin, TX multiple times this week, including an appearance at the fan favorite Luck Reunion, held at Willie Nelson’s Luck Ranch. She will also support American Aquarium for a week of dates in July. Please see live dates, with more to be added soon, below.
Today, American Songwriter premiered the album standout “Fool’s Gold.” Murray says, “Sparked by a gray, rainy summer day (after really fun plans had to be canceled), I came up with the line, ‘How does a woman stop it from raining all day?’ as a metaphysical rhetorical about all the silent, unseen burdens placed on Woman. The song came really fast from there (which is unusual for me), digging into my own depression at the time. The piano playing on this track makes it feel like you’re floating on a cloud and I was honored to have my friend and incredible singer/songwriter Erin Rae lend her vocals to this song’s backing vocals.”
Holler previously shared the video for the first single, “Watchin’ The World Pass Me By,” a song that channels Jerry Jeff Walker and Bobbie Gentry as a self-proclamation on how the Honky Tonk lifestyle chooses its victims. It features appearances by She Returns From War, Sean Thompson, and more. Murray says, “After living in Nashville for over ten years, you get to seein’ it all! A kissoff to the music business, the arbitrariness of success, and the sometimes strong desire to quit it all and move to the beach, this song’s got quite a few easter eggs for the careful listener. Ultimately, all I want to do is sit in a honky tonk with a beer and a great jukebox and listen to the classics.”
Born and raised in Atlanta, Murray first fell in love with country music at the age of five, when she heard Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits on cassette in her mother’s car. After self-releasing her debut album in 2013, she moved to Nashville, quickly finding her place in the community as she helped establish the now legendary “Honky Tonk Tuesdays” series and also became one of the first women to front a band at local favorite dive bar Santa’s Pub. Murray worked multiple jobs at a time to pay for her sophomore album, Southern Ambrosia, which landed on an array of “Best Of” lists and prompted Rolling Stone to declare her an “Artist You Need To Know,” praising her sound as “country-rock with a deep, poetic reverence for the land in which it was born.” The breakout critical acclaim didn’t translate to breakout success, though, and Murray soon found herself right back where she started, unsure of where to go or what it all meant. “I felt stuck,” she recalls. “My father died suddenly when I was 25, a wound that never heals, and through breakups, car wrecks, and just general brokenness, all of which I was still processing when the whole world shut down in 2020. And while I’d had some brushes with notoriety and a few opportunities to tour in Europe and share bills with some fantastic artists over the years, it just seemed like I was spinning my wheels getting nowhere.”
So Murray did what she always does when the going gets tough: she kept writing, kept performing, worked harder. “I just wrote and wrote and stockpiled songs for the right opportunity,” she explains. “I knew I needed to level up.” And on Little Blue, level up, she did.
“I’ve been to some pretty low places these last ten years,” Murray confesses. “Faced a lot of heartbreak and loss and grief, but you have to learn to live with those things if you’re going to survive. You have to persevere. A lot of the characters on this record are coming to terms with the fact that life just has a lot of sadness in it. But making peace with that sadness is what allows you to carry on and find joy and meaning and purpose.” She offers, “Our time here is so short on this little blue dot. Too short for all the bullshit we get caught up in day to day. This whole record is dropping in and out of these little snippets of sadness in life, but I wanted to end on this note of hope, this reminder that you can still find love and beauty no matter how dark things may seem.”
All it takes is a little perseverance.
Kristina Murray’s Little Blue will be available across digital platforms, compact disc, and standard black vinyl. It is available for pre-order NOW via Normaltown/New West Records.
Kristina Murray Little Blue Track Listing:
1. You Got Me
2. Has Been
3. The After Midnight Special
4. Fool’s Gold
5. Watchin’ The World Pass Me By
6. Get Down To It (feat. Logan Ledger)
7. Just A Little While Longer
8. Phenix City
9. Little Blue
Kristina Murray Live:
March 12 – Austin, TX – Radio Roundup at Radio/East
March 13 – Austin, TX – Luck Reunion x Western AF
March 13 – Austin, TX – The White Horse (New West Records SXSW Party)
March 14 – Austin, TX – Still Austin
April 4 – Nashville, TN – Skinny Dennis (w/ The Deslondes)
May 9 – Nashville, TN – Skinny Dennis (Little Blue Nashville Album Release Show)
June 6 – Nashville, TN – 3rd & Lindsley (WMOT Finally Friday)
June 22 – Atlanta, GA – Eddie’s (Little Blue Atlanta Album Release Show)
July 21 – Madison, WI – High Noon Saloon (Supporting American Aquarium)
July 22 – Rockford, IL – Anderson Japanese Gardens (Supporting American Aquarium)
July 23 – Indianapolis, IN – Hi-Fi (Supporting American Aquarium)
July 24 – Nashville, TN – The Blue Room at Third Man Records (Supporting American Aquarium)
July 25 – Waverly, AL – Standard Deluxe (Supporting American Aquarium)
July 27 – Asheville, NC – Orange Peel (Supporting American Aquarium)