Hiss Golden Messenger announces I’m People, shares Who You Gonna Run To?
Hiss Golden Messenger paired a new performance of “Who You Gonna Run To?” with news of I’m People, a May 1 album shaped in California and North Carolina.
Hiss Golden Messenger used “Who You Gonna Run To?” to point directly at its next chapter, announcing I’m People and placing the song as track 2 on an album due from Chrysalis Records on May 1, 2026. The performance arrived as a clear reminder of why MC Taylor’s project has remained durable since 2008: it folds roots music, soul, folk and rock into something sturdy, restless and emotionally plainspoken.
Taylor, the North Carolina singer-songwriter behind the project, has built Hiss Golden Messenger into one of Americana’s most recognizable crossovers. The band’s run includes Hallelujah Anyhow in 2017, Terms of Surrender in 2019 and Jump for Joy in 2023, along with a Grammy nomination for Best Americana Album for Terms of Surrender at the 63rd Annual GRAMMY Awards. That history matters because it frames I’m People not as a reset, but as the latest move in a catalog that has always favored breadth over purity.
The new album is being presented as immediate, vulnerable and fully dancing, a combination that fits the current appetite for roots music that feels lived-in rather than museum-bound. Hiss Golden Messenger has long worked in that space, where reflective songwriting meets genre blending and the result sounds less like a revival than a negotiation between memory and motion. In today’s Americana landscape, that approach has particular force: listeners keep responding to music that carries regional textures, but speaks in contemporary terms about doubt, resilience and the search for connection.
The album’s geography also gives it shape. Some of the songs that became I’m People were written during a reflective stretch in Bolinas, California, while others came together in Taylor’s North Carolina Piedmont studio. That split between the Pacific coast and the Piedmont mirrors the band’s broader artistic range, moving between inward-looking writing and a more propulsive, open-armed sound. With “Who You Gonna Run To?” as an early focal point, Hiss Golden Messenger has positioned I’m People as a record that extends its Americana roots without settling for nostalgia.
Know something we missed? Have a correction or additional information?
Submit a Tip
