Allison Russell on Finding Joy ‘In the Hour of Chaos,’ a Duets-Filled Third Album That’s a Jubilee Unto Itself
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- Allison Russell releases her third solo album "In the Hour of Chaos," with featured guests on 10 of its 11 tracks — a sharp departure from her prior two records, "Outside Child" and "The Returner," which had no features at all.
- Guests range from Norah Jones, Brittney Spencer, and Kashus Culpepper to lesser-known artists Russell actively champions, including Ahya Simone (whom she calls "the Gen Z Alice Coltrane"), Chibueze Ihuoma, Denitia, and Julie Williams.
- The album was recorded slowly over two years — in contrast to "Outside Child" (4 days) and "The Returner" (6 days) — with long-distance co-writing from collaborators including Wendy Melvoin, Lisa Coleman, and Meg McCormick.
- Russell scrapped a planned trilogy-closer titled "Motherland," saying that project requires her to go to Africa with her family, which her schedule hasn't permitted; she describes "In the Hour of Chaos" as "almost like the mixtape to a musical that's yet to be written."
- Russell says the duets-first approach was a deliberate response to "divide-and-conquer" and algorithmic negativity bias — she wanted listeners to "hear the conversations" — and was shaped by feeling "like a revenant or a ghost in my own home" after two Broadway stints in "Hadestown" and near-constant touring.
- The vinyl and streaming/CD versions carry different track orders, with Russell calling the vinyl sequence the "director's cut" and her "true artist's album order."
Why it matters: For an artist whose first two solo albums drew wide top-10 praise without a single guest feature, pivoting to a duet on nearly every track reframes Russell's project around collaboration and artist-discovery — and the vinyl-vs-streaming ordering split gives completists a reason to buy the physical. Shelving the planned "Motherland" trilogy-closer, meanwhile, signals she's prioritizing communal process over trilogy bookkeeping.
