Consider this your official invitation to the Summer of Elizabeth Cook. The revered country singer-songwriter — Florida-bred, Nashville-based, and Grand Ole Opry-adjacent to the tune of 400+ performances (without ever being inducted, but who’s counting) — has announced her new studio album, Great Television, arriving August 14 via Thirty Tigers. It’s her first full-length since 2020’s Aftermath, and if the just-released lead single is any indication, Cook has come back swinging.

Produced by Shooter Jennings and recorded with Cook’s live band at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, Great Television is a potent collision of country and rock and roll that maps the hidden corners of the American experience. The record features collaborations with country royalty Wynonna Judd and Turnpike Troubadours frontman Evan Felker, and finds Cook expanding on the novelistic sensibilities of her recent work while tightening her arrangements into songs that hit with immediate impact.

The first taste is “Razorwire Wall,” a hot-blooded duet with Evan Felker that Cook wrote — and this is not a drill — about dropping her ex-boyfriend off at jail. “Razorwire Wall is a song about when fierce love finds fierce people,” Cook says. “Having a voice like Evan Felker join me is probably gonna cause a lot of fence damage.” Watch the music video below.

Great Television takes its title from the opening track “Sunset Promenade” and its knowing line, “Turns out hurricanes are great television.” The album cover riffs on that theme with a painterly image from a nationally televised 1989 football game at Cook’s alma mater, Georgia Southern University, where the team stormed to victory in the middle of a Category 4 hurricane. Fitting imagery for a record that interrogates our media-saturated moment — including Cook’s own uneasy relationship with fame after her 2011 Late Show with David Letterman appearance vaulted her into the spotlight and led to an ill-fated CBS sitcom deal.

“To me Great Television speaks to how we’re so consumed by media, enriched and manipulated by it at the same time,” she says. “The whole experience made me realize how the media can interfere with your life and what you’re meant to do.”

Elsewhere, Cook trains her eye on the lives typically sidelined in the dominant narrative. “Girls of Atomic City” kicks the record into full-tilt momentum, while “Thiokol Tripwire” unpacks the story of a 1971 explosion at a Georgia chemical plant that made tripwires for the Vietnam War — one of the few employers in the region that would hire Black women, and the site where most of the lives lost that day belonged to those same workers. It’s the kind of unearthing Cook has quietly specialized in for two decades, from her 2007 breakthrough Balls to Don Was-produced Welder (2010) to the Billboard-charting Exodus of Venus (2016).

The album lands in tandem with the theatrical release of The Easy Kind, a narrative feature inspired by Cook’s life that premieres tonight and tomorrow at the IFC Center in NYC before an Oscar-qualifying week-long run. Directed by Katy Chevigny in her narrative feature debut, the film stars Cook alongside David Letterman (playing a version of himself), Karen Allen, Susie Essman, Melissa Jackson, and Charles Esten in a hybrid, semi-fictional portrait of an artist who has spent her career resisting Nashville conformity.

“Katy proposed the idea of having the film be a hybrid, which I thought was genius,” Cook recalls. “It provided me with a protective layer from exposing too much, but allowed me to get my point across and work with actors in a way that was truly creative.”

Great Television Tracklist:
1. Sunset Promenade
2. Girls of Atomic City
3. Thiokol Tripwire
4. Okeechobee Mud
5. Razorwire Wall
6. The Easy Kind
7. Caldonia & The Love Convoy
8. In Your Veins
9. 19th Nervous Breakdown
10. Feverfew
11. Lightly

Great Television is out August 14 via Thirty Tigers. Pre-save, pre-order, and go dig into Elizabeth Cook’s catalog while you wait — you’re going to want the full context before the album drops.