Elizabeth Cook has never been one to color inside Nashville’s neatly drawn lines, and her new single “Sunset Promenade” is another reminder of exactly why that matters. Out now via Thirty Tigers, the track is the title-inspiring cornerstone of her forthcoming album Great Television, due August 14 and produced by Shooter Jennings.

“Sunset Promenade” arrives with rocking guitars, sweeping strings, and a chorus that hits like a gut-punch wrapped in a hug: “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.” It’s a love letter to Cook’s three best gal pals — Ashley Monroe, Shelly Rose, and her niece — set against a backdrop of media saturation and the strange loneliness of being terminally online.

The accompanying music video leans hard into VHS-era aesthetics, featuring a glitching Elizabeth fronting a TV-headed backing band. It’s part fever dream, part cultural critique, and entirely worth your time.

Watch the “Sunset Promenade” music video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ixXAa2dDfU

Speaking exclusively to American Songwriter, Cook explained the tension at the heart of the song: “It’s just a love song for them with the overriding idea that we’re also isolated in our media bubbles. I feel like it connects us, but it also divides us and it can be pretty manipulative.” That thematic thread runs through the entire album, which takes its name and cover art from a 1989 televised football game at Cook’s alma mater, Georgia Southern University — a game played through a Category 4 hurricane.

Recorded at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles with Cook’s live band, Great Television marks her first new studio project since 2020’s Aftermath and includes a collaboration with country royalty Wynonna Judd. The tracklist digs into overlooked American histories, from “Girls of Atomic City” to “Thiokol Tripwire,” a haunting recounting of a 1971 explosion at a Georgia chemical plant where mostly Black women lost their lives while making tripwires for the Vietnam War.

Cook also recently sat down with Killer Mike for a wide-ranging episode of Conversate with Killer Mike, digging into outlaw country, working-class America, faith, family, and forgotten history. The pair covered everything from Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, and Waylon Jennings to the realities of Southern poverty, church culture, addiction, recovery, and what it takes to stay independent in an industry allergic to nonconformists.

Adding another dimension to this moment, The Easy Kind — a narrative film inspired by Cook’s life — continues its cinematic run this summer. Directed by Katy Chevigny and starring Cook alongside David Letterman, Karen Allen, Susie Essman, Melissa Jackson, and Charles Esten, the film traces her journey from singing in her parents’ band at age four to logging more than 400 performances at the Grand Ole Opry. Premiere and Q&A screenings are scheduled through July at Alamo Drafthouse locations in Chicago, Dallas, and Austin, as well as theaters in Houston, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle.

For more than two decades, Cook has been one of American music’s most vital storytellers — the kind who can write a career-defining anthem like “Sometimes It Takes Balls to Be a Woman,” earn a spot on Rolling Stone’s year-end list with 2010’s Welder, and land on the Billboard charts with 2016’s Exodus of Venus, all while operating well outside the mainstream country machine.

Great Television is available to pre-save and pre-order now, with Cook hitting Nashville’s Rhythm & Roots at The Hermitage on June 26, followed by Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in San Francisco on October 4 and CaveFest 2026 in Pelham, TN on October 9. Cue it up, turn it up, and let one of country’s most fearless voices remind you what real songwriting sounds like.