Allison de Groot is a clawhammer banjo player from Winnipeg, a Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo recipient and Americana Music Association Instrumentalist of the Year nominee, best known for her duo with fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves. Rich Ruth is the recording project of Nashville multi-instrumentalist Michael Ruth, whose immersive instrumental albums, most recently 2024’s Water Still Flows on Third Man Records, draw from ambient, spiritual jazz, minimalism, and synth-driven post-rock. He is also a third of Shrunken Elvis, the Nashville trio he shares with pedal steel guitarist Spencer Cullum and guitarist Sean Thompson.
Their self-titled album, which will be released on 2nd October 2026 via Western Vinyl, began with a simpler plan: Ruth would produce a solo record for de Groot. Over roughly a year in his Nashville studio, the plan dissolved. The two started composing together, and the record that emerged belongs equally to both of them, shaped as much by space and process as by melody. De Groot’s banjo runs through looping and delay, acting as the pulse at the centre of the arrangements, its rolling figures gathering momentum before giving way to Ruth’s synthesisers, with violin and string arrangements from Patrick M’Gonigle and pedal steel from Cullum widening the album’s reach.
Across eight tracks, the album keeps a tangible sense of the human touch at the centre of something broader: passages of unadorned banjo and violin, distant birdsong, and fragments of radio alongside vibraphone, soaring guitars, and synths. The result is two distinct voices arriving not at a new, shared sound. In the meantime, the first track Nervion has been released as a single. An atmospheric piece of music it serves as a taster for this collaboration – listen below.
“Allison de Groot and Rich Ruth” tracklist:
1 Nervion
2 New Intervention
3 Bass Crust
4 10-14
5 Distance From Then
6 Sorgin
7 Rocks from the Moon
8 A Wizard and a Stork
