That high lonesome note that Joshua Ray Walker held in his spine-tingling ballad “Voices” hits in an entirely different way in his swaggering new song “Sexy After Dark.” While “Voices,” a breakthrough for the Texas songwriter, was a dark, somber commentary on suicidal ideations, “Sexy After Dark” is a gloriously confident anthem that frames Walker’s falsetto as a come-hither call.
The song, powered by brassy horns and an organ-sounding pedal steel solo by Adam Kurtz, announces Walker’s new album, See You Next Time. The follow-up to last year’s Glad You Made It, See You Next Time completes a trilogy of albums about a honky-tonk refuge for outcasts that began with 2019’s Wish You Were Here.
“Anticipation is a lost art,” Walker sings in “Sexy After Dark,” which arrives with a surrealist music video directed by Josh David Jordan. Like Walker’s previous videos, it’s full of colorful characters and unexpected situations. At one point, a woman trots a horse down an abandoned city street; in another, the crew commandeer a convertible to go riding with their king — Walker, draped in his typically outlandish jackets, robes and scarves.
“There’s a deep history of sexy-crooner country songs played by dudes who were pretty unsexy by all accounts but still had so much swagger,” Walker says. “‘Sexy After Dark’ was my attempt at writing a song like that, a fun song I’d want to crank up and party to. It all came back to wanting to really push the boundaries of what I could do on this album.”
See You Next Time will be released October 8th on State Fair Records. Walker will launch a headlining tour in the fall, including an appearance at AmericanaFest in Nashville.