About
After the success of her fiery 2024 LP, Baptized By The Blaze, Nashville outlaw siren India Ramey is back with Villain Era, set for release on May 8, 2026, via Copaco Records/Blue Élan. Baptized By The Blaze was the story of Ramey’s journey through the fire, a harrowing passage toward healing and empowerment. Villain Era is firmly rooted in her own reckoning; it doesn’t ask for permission, it kicks the door wide open.
“This album is the ‘healed’ me,” Ramey says. “I didn’t know how to have boundaries because I was such a people pleaser. When you live your life that way, you lose sight of who you really are. I’ve spent the last few years finding my authentic self, reclaiming my identity. The title track, ‘Welcome To My Villain Era,’ is me saying I’m not going to suffer fools anymore. I’m not compromising anymore. If my boundaries offend you, I’ll happily play the villain in that story.”
Armed with that conviction and a new batch of songs, Ramey left the South for the first time to record in Los Angeles with two-time Grammy-nominated producer Eric Corne. Together, they built a soundscape as cinematic as it is cathartic. Ramey, whose fans have taken to calling her “The Woman In Black” and “the Wednesday Addams of country music,” told Corne she wanted the album to sound like Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn had risen from the grave to score a Quentin Tarantino film. Corne assembled a powerhouse band to help her pull it off, including Ted Russell Kamp (Shooter Jennings) on bass, Eugene Edwards (Dwight Yoakam) and Chris Masterson (Steve Earle, The Mastersons, The Wallflowers) on guitar, Eleanor Whitmore (Steve Earle & The Dukes, The Mastersons) on fiddle, Kevin Brown on drums, Boo Bernstein (Emmylou Harris, Dwight Yoakam) on pedal steel, and Haley Spence Brown (The Doohickeys) on backing vocals.
“He didn’t just listen to me, he heard me,” Ramey says of Corne. “The musicians were equally respectful of what my vision was, and they went above and beyond. It was the most collaborative, emboldening recording experience I've ever had.”
The result is Villain Era: ten spaghetti western–meets–honky tonk vignettes, penned solely by Ramey, laced with grit, gallows humor, and emotional precision.
With the first notes of opener “We Ride at Dawn,” Ramey puts her boots on the ground and reclaims her territory. A callback to “King of the Ashes” from her 2020 LP Shallow Graves, the song rises from the rubble with reverb, ghostly pedal steel, and the promise of revenge from the women who survived. On “Scattered and Smothered,” Ramey trades the battlefield for a Waffle House booth at 2 a.m., where heartbreak meets hangover in a haze of regret. “Well I’m a hot mess, I must confess / Ever since he brought up takin’ next steps / And my drunk ass needs some hash browns and scrambled eggs,” she sings, As patrons fight, chairs fly, and late-night shenanigans ensue in the background, our heroine is lost in thought, hoping the grease soaks up the memories of the night she’s attempting to put in her rearview.
The tone turns bittersweet on “Crying in My Lingerie,” a deceptively upbeat breakup song that captures the loneliness of a woman who’s realizing her marriage is over. Doing her best to fan the flames of something long since gone, she drowns her sorrows in boxed wine. Dressed in the now-meaningless symbols of desire and devotion, she realizes she’s become a divorcee in waiting.
Throughout Villain Era, Ramey explores what it means to step fully into oneself after years of just trying to survive. “There’s a lot of freedom in knowing yourself,” she says. “It makes you feral. But in these times, joy is resistance. We should be having some fun, too.”
Saving Country Music once wrote, “Many of the women in country music these days love to sing about lighting stuff on fire to symbolically tease their empowerment. With India Ramey, you think she’ll actually haul off and do it.” It’s an apt description for an artist who doesn’t just tell stories of strength, she lives them out loud.
With five studio albums under her belt, Ramey continues to be one of country music’s fiercest truth-tellers. Her 2017 breakout Snake Handler landed her on Rolling Stone’s “10 New Country Artists You Need to Know.” Her 2020 “post-apocalyptic western” album, Shallow Graves, earned international recognition, debuting at #6 on the Euro Americana Chart. Then came 2024’s Baptized By The Blaze, a searing chronicle of her battle with a dependence on prescribed medication and PTSD stemming from childhood trauma. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, she sang on the title track, “Yesterday I set myself on fire / With my own hands I built that funeral pyre / I built it so high the flames touched the sky / And now I am alive because I died.”
Now, with Villain Era, India Ramey stands unapologetically in her power, delivering songs that cut deep and laugh loudly, songs that balance the weight of lived experience with the freedom of release.