The opening track to Nashville outlaw India Ramey’s forthcoming album is Welcome to My Villain Era providing the title and mission statement for Villain Era, which is due out on 8th May 2026, via Copoco/Blue Élan Records. Following the success of her fiery 2024 LP Baptized By The Blaze, which chronicled a hard-won journey through trauma, healing, and survival and described by AUK reviewer Charles Lacey as “Inspiring and redemptive themes sung and played with a distinctive country flavour”. Villain Era finds Ramey rooted in reckoning and self-possession. “This album is the ‘healed’ me,” she explains. “I spent years as a people pleaser, not knowing how to have boundaries. I lost sight of who I really was. These songs are about reclaiming that.”
Recorded in Los Angeles with two-time Grammy-nominated producer Eric Corne, Villain Era features an impressive list of musicians, including Eugene Edwards (Dwight Yoakam) and Chris Masterson (The Wallflowers) on guitar, and Eleanor Whitmore (Steve Earle) on fiddle, helping Ramey bring her vision to life.
Written entirely by Ramey, Villain Era is described as “a cinematic, spaghetti western-meets-honky-tonk collection”. Fans have dubbed her “The Woman in Black” and “the Wednesday Addams of country music,” and she leaned fully into that vision, saying she wanted the record “to sound like Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn rising from the grave to score a Quentin Tarantino film”. The result is a bold album that balances grit, gallows humour, and joy as resistance. With Villain Era, India Ramey doesn’t ask for permission; she claims her territory, laughs loudly, and dares anyone to underestimate her.
Ramey has unveiled Scattered and Smothered, the latest single from Villain Era. Set in a Waffle House after a drunken, wild night “being somewhere she’s not supposed to have been,” is a laid-back, tongue-in-cheek tale of woe about a woman feeling stifled by a good man and needing to break free.
