Notes · New Cascade
10 Underrated Country Artists for Fans of Luke Combs and Eric Church
July 18, 2026
If you like Luke Combs and Eric Church, the artists to hear next are singers like Charles Wesley Godwin, Stephen Wilson Jr., Colby Acuff, and Kolby Cooper — underrated country acts built on the same blue-collar realism and big, voice-forward production. Below are ten of them, one representative song each, running from veteran deep cuts to brand-new names.
The Luke Combs and Eric Church lane works for a simple reason: the voice does the heavy lifting. Production stays out of the way — real drums, real guitars, a little darkness around the edges — and the songs are about work, family, and the gap between what you dreamed and what you got. Combs booms. Church broods. Both sound like they've actually held the jobs they sing about.
The good news is that lane is deeper than country radio lets on. There's a whole bench of artists doing blue-collar realism at a high level — some veterans who never got their due, some songwriters the critics love, and a new wave still playing rooms small enough that you can stand at the rail. Ten artists, one song each.
Hiding in plain sight
1. “Guitar Man” — Kip Moore(2017)
Yes, Kip Moore had radio hits — but his deep cuts are where the gravel lives, and the closer of Slowheart is the best of them. Written with Dan Couch and Westin Davis after Moore watched a bar singer who reminded him of his own twenties, it's an unvarnished portrait of a life spent playing for strangers night after night. If Church's quieter album tracks are your favorites, start here.
Find it on Spotify →2. “Livin' the Dream” — Drake White(2016)
White is one of the great voices of his generation and somehow still underrated. This single from his debut album Spark, written by Tom Douglas, Jaren Johnston, and Luke Laird, rides a nylon-string guitar figure while a broke couple takes stock of a life that's rich where it counts. The title flips the sarcastic answer everybody gives at work into something sincere — pure blue-collar realism.
Find it on Spotify →3. “Porch Swing Angel” — Muscadine Bloodline(2016)
The Alabama duo of Charlie Muncaster and Gary Stanton built a devoted touring audience with no major label behind them, and this early single is the song fans still holler back at them. It's a slow-burn, friends-to-lovers ballad carried by two voices that blend like they grew up down the road from each other — because they did. The independence is the point: this is what the lane sounds like with nobody sanding it down.
Find it on Spotify →The storytellers
4. “Family Ties” — Charles Wesley Godwin(2023)
The West Virginian's baritone fills a room the way Combs' does, but Godwin points it at Appalachian family history. The title track of his 19-song Big Loud debut — produced by Al Torrence, who also did his breakout record Seneca — is about being bound to your people and their old ways whether you chose it or not. If you've worn out the Combs ballads, this is the next level up in weight.
Find it on Spotify →5. “Year to Be Young 1994” — Stephen Wilson Jr.(2023)
Wilson calls back to the Nirvana-and-MTV era over guitars that hit with a grunge edge — the darker, distorted end of the Church spectrum taken one shade further. Written with Benjamin West and featured on his acclaimed 2023 album søn of dad, it's nostalgia with teeth: the year everything felt possible, remembered by somebody who knows how it turned out. Critics put søn of dad on multiple year-end best lists for a reason.
Find it on Spotify →6. “Above My Head” — Drayton Farley(2023)
Farley writes about the working life from inside it — the hours traded for a paycheck, the ceiling you can feel but can't see. This preview track from his 2023 album Twenty on High is stark and unhurried, letting the weariness in his voice carry what a lesser production would bury in strings. It's the Springsteen instinct filtered through Alabama dirt.
Find it on Spotify →The next wave
7. “First One In” — Wade Carver(2026)
Full disclosure: Wade Carver records with our cooperative, so we're biased — but the fit here is real. Carver is a dryland wheat farmer from the Palouse in eastern Washington, and his debut single started as a 4 a.m. voice memo before a day's work: a song about doing the job when nobody's watching. He talks his verses in the old recitation tradition of Red Sovine and Tom T. Hall, and when the chorus opens up you hear exactly why this list exists — Kip Moore's gravel, Combs' boom, Church's darker guitar edge, all in one place.
8. “If I Were the Devil” — Colby Acuff(2021)
Acuff comes out of the mountains of North Idaho — proof the working-class country lane runs all the way to the Northwest. The title cut of his 2021 sophomore album imagines the devil's job from the inside, sung in a keening mountain voice with a live-off-the-floor band feel. He's since made it to the Opry stage, but he still plays like a guy with something to prove.
Find it on Spotify →9. “Excuses” — Kolby Cooper(2021)
Cooper came up hard and fast in the Texas scene, and this song — written with Brett Tyler and Jordan Walker — became his first Top 40 country hit and the lead single to his debut album Boy from Anderson County to the Moon. It's a breakup song delivered with a raw-throated force that lands closer to Combs' full-throttle side than almost anyone else on this list. The voice is the whole argument.
Find it on Spotify →10. “State You Left Me In” — Jake Worthington(2023)
Worthington sings pure Texas honky-tonk with a voice deep enough to rattle a dance floor. This five-minute heartbreaker, penned with Timothy Baker and Roger Springer, opens his self-titled Big Loud debut and refuses to rush a single bar of its misery. If what you love about Combs is the classic-country bones under the modern boom, Worthington is the bones with nothing else added.
Find it on Spotify →None of these artists sound exactly like Luke Combs or Eric Church — that's what makes them worth your time. What they share is the harder thing to fake: songs about real work, sung like the work actually happened.
Hear what we're building
New Cascade is a Pacific Northwest artist cooperative. Wade Carver's debut single “First One In” is out now — heartland country about the work nobody sees.
From our roster · Wade Carver