CoSign: Hudson Freeman Turns the Rapture Inside Out on Doom Country

CoSign is a recurring feature series from Consequence that puts a spotlight on a rising artist who has caught our eyes and ears with an exciting new release. For the latest edition, we chat with rising singer-songwriter Hudson Freeman, who returns this week with his standout sophomore album, Doom Country. Welcome to Doom Country. This is the land of the sprawl and the squall: an interstate cutting through the country past Oklahoma windmills, a folk song swelling into a whine as guitar and violin curdle against each other. Here, hell is real. The signs along I-40 say so. Its drivers chase what’s left of the American dream and wonder whether God is angry. The Rapture is coming, or maybe it already came. All that’s left are shuttered amusement parks, a lone gunshot on the interstate, and the eerie hiss of a cassette tape — a transmission from a country that may already be gone. For Hudson Freeman, the New York-based songwriter and our latest CoSign, Doom Country wasn’t just about depicting some poignant vision of the end times; it was about subverting the one he grew up with. The son of evangelical missionaries, Freeman is from Texas, and he was raised with a dark fascination with the...