Americana legends celebrate 21st-century releases on latest career retrospective.
Forty years in, the Cowboy Junkies remain one of the great under-the-surface bands in Americana: despite having a million-selling classic to their name, they rarely make best-of lists, rarely get listed as influences, and yet possess a catalogue so consistently rich that they can assemble a compilation like Open to Beauty purely from the second half of their career and still make it feel essential. Even more remarkable, this could easily be a conventional double album, rather than a compilation, such is the consistency of tone and material.
Drawing from every studio album released this century – from Open through to Such Ferocious Beauty – this collection captures the recorded second act of a band who never really stood still, even if their core identity has remained unmistakable. The Junkies of 2026 are recognisably the same group who recorded The Trinity Sessions: understated, patient, intimate, and allergic to unnecessary drama. But these recordings also reveal a band working from a far broader palette than in those famously lo-fi early years. The sound has become more cinematic over time; not bigger in an arena-rock sense, but wider, deeper, more textured.
And at the centre of it all is chief songwriter Michael Timmins, perhaps the most understated guitar hero of his generation. The Junkies are almost always at their most compelling when Timmins allows his blues influences to fully surface, loosening the reins on the band’s often meditative tendencies. That instinct announces itself immediately with opener Dragging Hooks, a murky, feedback-laced swamp of a song that evolved during the Waltz Across America touring period. It drifts and growls rather than charges, but it has a physicality to it that reminds you how quietly powerful this band can be.
Elsewhere, Notes Falling Slow exemplifies the group’s mastery of slow-burn atmosphere. Few bands understand pacing like the Junkies do; they let songs breathe until emotion seems to materialise naturally from the spaces between the notes.
Blue Eyed Saviour is classic Cowboy Junkies; built on a restrained country-blues stomp, it never raises its voice, yet simmers with indignation throughout. When Margo Timmins delivers the line, “I’ve never heard such nonsense, never heard such lies!”, she does so without theatricality or bombast, which somehow makes it hit harder. That has always been one of the Junkies’ greatest strengths: they rarely force emotion onto the listener. Instead, they draw you inward, allowing tension, sadness or anger to emerge almost conversationally. Margo’s voice remains extraordinary here – feathery and weightless one moment, quietly commanding the next – gliding through these sprawling songs with effortless precision.
Similarly, when Margo sings the title line from “Fuck, I hate the cold”, it’s not about deliberately provocative word, it’s the literal sound of someone thumping the wall in boiled-over frustration.
Remarkably, the band still features the original four members, three of them famously from the Timmins family. Across four decades they have simply kept going: releasing thoughtful, beautifully crafted Americana records and touring relentlessly, sustained less by industry machinery than by the loyalty of listeners. They’ve always existed slightly below the surface, never shouting for attention, never chasing trends, just quietly doing the grind.
Open to Beauty is not merely a retrospective of latter-day Cowboy Junkies; it’s evidence of a group that has aged with uncommon grace. Treasure them, and if they pass within a million miles of you, go and see them.
