Elizabeth Cook returns with new album, Great Television, which will be released on 14th August 2026 via Thirty Tigers. Described as “a potent collision of country and rock & roll”, the album was produced by Shooter Jennings and features collaborations with Wynonna Judd and Evan Felker.
Recorded with Cook’s live band at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, Great Television marks a commanding new addition to a formidable catalogue. The Florida-bred, Nashville-based singer-songwriter’s first new project since 2020’s Aftermath, the album finds Cook on a mission to illuminate the type of lives typically sidelined in the dominant media narrative and the emotional truth buried within long-overlooked histories. Cook maps the hidden corners of the American experience from both a deeply personal perspective and a perspective of reflection on historical events and their ripple effects.
Inspired by the lyric to the lead-off single, the LP’s title and cover art, which features a painterly photograph of a nationally televised football game at her alma mater, Georgia Southern University, in 1989, when the team stormed to victory while playing through a Category 4 hurricane, gesture toward the psychic dangers of media saturation.
The LP arrives alongside the theatrical release of The Easy Kind; a narrative film inspired by Cook’s life as an artist who has long resisted Nashville convention. Starring Cook alongside David Letterman, Karen Allen, Susie Essman, Melissa Jackson, and Charles Esten, the film blends fact and fiction to trace her remarkable journey from singing in her parents’ band at age four to performing at the Grand Ole Opry more than 400 times. Directed by Katy Chevigny, The Easy Kind offers an intimate portrait of Cook’s uncompromising artistic life through candid home moments, live performances, and deeply personal storytelling. You can see the trailer at this link.
Taken together, Great Television and The Easy Kind reaffirm the extraordinary legacy Cook has forged by following her own vision wherever it leads. Whether excavating forgotten histories or reflecting on her own life, Cook remains devoted to uncovering the humanity beneath the surface of every tale she tells. “I’m always trying to serve a bigger story than my own,” she says. “But it’s always a thin veil; it’s all autobiographical on some level, or I wouldn’t be driven to do it. For me that’s the best of both worlds: getting to express my truth, while also sharing someone else’s story.”
Cook has released a new single, Sunset Promenade, a country song with rocking guitars and enrapturing strings. The song inspired the title of her forthcoming album. The song’s chorus features the potent lyric: “Turns out hurricanes are great television / Turns out all the things in my head are a prison / And I just want a friend I can stand and do my time with.”
