Rayland Baxter’s new album, True Violet, will be released on 23rd October 2026 via ATO Records. he feels like the first time he’s truly found it. It is his first album in more than four years. An 11-song collection, it is designed to capture the slow, steady metamorphosis of becoming someone new. The album was co-produced by Nick Waterhouse and Paul Butler and written during a years-long period of solitude in the hills of Tennessee, where he penned more than 70 songs.
“It’s very personal and bloody,” Baxter says of True Violet. “There are bruises and bite marks in these songs. Tears and enlightenment and pains of the heart.” Baxter spent the years surrounding his 2022 album If I Were A Butterfly touring heavily while navigating difficult relationships, personal loss, and the death of his father. After returning to his quiet Tennessee hometown, Baxter found himself with the stillness to confront the patterns and emotions he had spent years outrunning.
“I sat in my chair alone for a year and wrote a bunch of songs, and what started off as an attempt to write a record got sideswiped by mediocre attempts I wouldn’t even sing to my dog,” he recalls. “Then, like many times over the last three years, I called my sister. We talked about life and family and love and heartache, and our individual experiences with all of that. She simply encouraged me to write about what I was feeling, something I was avoiding in the early stages of writing.”
That advice became a turning point for Baxter. From that trove of material he wrote during those quiet evenings came True Violet, a sweeping, tender, and sometimes raucous ode to reckoning and reconciliation. The album’s title reflects Baxter’s conception of its emotional landscape: “the reds of anger and the blues of sadness” ultimately converge in violet, a colour that represents the complexity of love, disappointment, pain, and acceptance.
You can pre-save/pre-order True Violet at this link.
Baxter has released the album opener Better Man, co-written with and featuring background vocals from Tyler Ballgame, that serves as a prologue for the journey he takes throughout the album. The song arrives alongside an official video directed by Joshua Shoemaker. About the song, Baxter explains, “Better Man is a song about making it through the hard times and coming out the other side better than before. It’s a reminder to myself that it’s ok to close the book on a time in my life, as long as I remember the lessons I learned during that time.”
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