There’s a certain mythology artists build around leaving home. Morgan Evans flips that script on Steel Town, a record that doesn’t chase escape so much as circle back to where everything began.
Out now via Virgin Music Group and Solrise Records, the album lands as Evans’ first full-length statement in nearly three years, shaped by a period of retreat to Newcastle, the coastal-industrial city that still hums beneath his songwriting. If earlier material leaned into the gloss of global country-pop, Steel Town feels recalibrated, grounded by memory, friction and something closer to lived experience.
Stream Steel Town HERE.
The title track, captured live at Howlin Festival, carries that weight with it. There’s a deliberate sense of place baked into the performance, archival footage of Newcastle folding into the present, turning the video into a kind of personal document. It’s not nostalgia exactly. More a reckoning with origin, with the version of yourself that existed before everything accelerated.
Across the new album, Evans threads together a narrative that moves from fracture to repair. The record leans into a sunlit blend of country and rock, but beneath that surface sits a quieter tension, the kind that comes from stepping away long enough to see your own life with clarity. After the viral rupture of ‘Over For You’ and the symbolic milestone of sold-out shows at the Sydney Opera House, Evans could have doubled down on scale. Instead, Steel Town narrows the lens, pulling focus back to the foundations. The result is a record that doesn’t try to outrun the past, but absorbs it, reshapes it, and carries it forward.
Fans will have the chance to toast with Evans on tour, as his headline Steel Town Tour makes its way across Australia and New Zealand in May and June with Laci Kaye Booth opening.
Go HERE for ticketing information.
