Notes · New Cascade
Pacific Northwest Country Artists to Listen to Now (2026)
July 18, 2026
The Pacific Northwest has a real country scene right now, led by Sunnyside, Washington's Zach Top and backed by a bench of working artists: Antwane Tyler in Snohomish, Margo Cilker in Goldendale, Colby Acuff in Coeur d'Alene, and bands like Jenny Don't and the Spurs in Portland. This guide covers nine current PNW-connected country artists and one representative song apiece.
When people talk about Washington music they mean grunge, and when they talk about country they mean somewhere at least a thousand miles southeast of here. Both habits miss what's actually been happening. The Northwest has quietly produced serious country talent for decades: Brandy Clark, one of Nashville's most decorated songwriters, grew up in Morton, a logging town of about 900 people in the shadow of Mount Rainier. Blaine Larsen, who put a single on country radio while still a teenager in the 2000s, was raised in Buckley. Jaime Wyatt, one of the sharpest outlaw-country voices of the last decade, grew up on Fox Island outside Tacoma.
That history matters because it's repeating itself, louder. A kid from a ranch outside Sunnyside is now one of the biggest neotraditional country artists in America, and behind him is a working bench of songwriters and bands spread across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho — wheat country, timber country, high desert. Here are nine current Pacific Northwest country artists worth your time, with one song each as a starting point.
Nashville has the infrastructure. The Northwest has the material: wheat, timber, rain, and long drives between towns.
Washington
1. “Sounds Like the Radio” — Zach Top(2024)
The proof of concept for the whole region. Top grew up on a ranch outside Sunnyside in the Yakima Valley, playing in a family bluegrass band called Top String from age seven, and his debut radio single — co-written with Carson Chamberlain and Wyatt McCubbin — was the most-added song at country radio the week it impacted. It's a '90s-country homage in the Keith Whitley and Randy Travis lineage that sounds like nothing else on 2024 playlists, which is exactly why it worked. If anyone asks whether Washington state can produce a country star, this is the one-word answer.
Find it on Spotify →2. “Tehachapi” — Margo Cilker(2021)
Cilker calls her music folkabilly — the same word Nanci Griffith used — and writes about the West's forgotten in-between places from her home in Goldendale, on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge. This one, from her debut album Pohorylle, was sparked partly by Little Feat's trucker classic and partly by an actual person she met from the town of Tehachapi. It's the best entry point into a catalog built on farm work, long highways, and plain-spoken detail.
Find it on Spotify →3. “Homesick” — Antwane Tyler
Tyler grew up in Snohomish, a Black kid adopted into a small logging-and-farming town, and that outsider-insider perspective runs through everything he writes. This single is an ode to family and the Pacific Northwest itself, inspired by the grandfather and fishing buddy who gave him his first guitar at age eight. He's built a genuinely local career — regional radio, a Seattle Kraken game performance, festival slots — and he's one of the scene's most compelling live voices right now.
Find it on Spotify →4. “First One In” — Wade Carver(2026)
Full disclosure: Wade Carver records with our cooperative, so we're biased — but a list of Washington country artists without a Palouse wheat farmer would have a hole in it. Carver runs his family's dryland wheat operation near Colfax, and his debut single started as a 4 a.m. voice memo recorded before the day's work began. It's heartland country about doing the job when nobody's watching, delivered partly in spoken word — the old recitation tradition of Red Sovine and Tom T. Hall, carried into 2026 over guitars with an Eric Church edge.
5. “Fat Kid” — Austin Jenckes(2019)
Jenckes grew up in Duvall, in the Snoqualmie Valley east of Seattle, and came to national attention on The Voice before settling into a songwriter's career. This single — written by Lori McKenna, Andrew Dorff, and Neil Mason, with McKenna singing on the record — is about every kid picked last at recess, and Jenckes has said it puts him right back in Duvall. He performed it for the Grand Ole Opry crowd, and it remains the emotional center of his debut album If You Grew Up Like I Did.
Find it on Spotify →Oregon
6. “Fire on the Ridge” — Jenny Don't and the Spurs
Portland's hardest-working country band, formed in 2012 by musicians who came up through the city's punk scene and never lost that engine. The title track of their third album opens with desert twang, heavy reverb, and guitar solos that split the difference between surf rock and spaghetti western, while elsewhere on the record they pull off straight Patsy Cline-style balladry. They tour relentlessly, and the live show is the argument: country played with punk stamina.
Find it on Spotify →7. “Watching Planes Go By” — Kassi Valazza(2023)
Arizona-born, Portland-based, and beloved by the songwriter crowd, Valazza cut her album Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing live with the cosmic-country band TK and the Holy Know-Nothings backing her. This track is country filtered through late-'60s folk haze — a character grounded by a broken foot, daydreaming about limits and perspective. It's the atmospheric end of the PNW country spectrum, and it earned national radio attention that most regional acts never see.
Find it on Spotify →Idaho
8. “Western White Pines” — Colby Acuff(2023)
A fifth-generation Idahoan from Coeur d'Alene who worked as a fly-fishing guide on the Coeur d'Alene River before music took over, Acuff calls what he makes mountain country music, and the label fits. The title track of his Sony debut — produced by Eddie Spear, who's worked with Zach Bryan and Cody Jinks — is a love letter to the North Idaho timber country that raised him. He'd already built the songs independently across three albums; the major label just turned up the volume.
Find it on Spotify →9. “Non-Typical Find” — Tylor and the Train Robbers(2021)
A Boise family band — frontman Tylor Ketchum, two Bushman brothers in the rhythm section — named for Black Jack Ketchum, the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang outlaw who is a distant relative of Tylor's. This fiddle-driven title track is based on a true story: a hunting buddy of Ketchum's who unexpectedly discovered human remains in the backcountry. That's the band in miniature — classic country storytelling instincts applied to real Idaho material, sharpened by a decade of constant touring.
Find it on Spotify →None of these artists sound alike, and that's the point. The Pacific Northwest doesn't have a Nashville-style machine stamping out a house sound — it has wheat farmers, fishing guides, punk converts, and family bands writing about the places they actually live. Pick any song above, follow it to the full record, and you'll find a region that's been hiding a country scene in plain sight.
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