Willow Avalon sees artists like Lainey Wilson, Ella Langley, and Kaitlin Butts surging in country music, but she dismisses any notion that some industry-wide awakening is underway. The credit, Avalon says, is due to the women themselves.
“For so long in
country music, there’s been a set number of doors for women,” Avalon says. The solution, as she sees it, is to build new doors.
That’s the goal of Pink Pocket Pistol, Avalon’s new album released in June via Atlantic Outpost/Assemble Sound. Despite being raised in a musical family in rural Georgia, the 27-year-old spent most of her life struggling to find her voice, much less an audience. But her 2025 debut LP, Southern Belle Raisin’ Hell, changed that, when tracks like “Homewrecker” and “Tequila and Whiskey” caught fire online, particularly among young women.
“It’s been so cool to see the response of other Southern women,” Avalon says of the record, “how they love that it’s sweet and Southern and scary and sparkling, and how they resonate with it — and how their husbands resonate with it. I have grown men writing me being like, ‘This song about killing men is the best song ever.’”
That song — ”Hypothetically Speaking” — is a duet with Butts. Avalon was a fan of the Oklahoma songwriter before “You Ain’t Gotta Die (To Be Dead to Me)” went viral in 2025 and made Butts a face of fiercely independent women making inroads into country music’s mainstream.
“In terms of say-what-you-want country music, Kaitlin paved the path for that,” Avalon says. “She’s someone like me, where ‘no’ is not in her vocabulary, so there is no door that is closed. If she gets an inch, she wants to share that inch with the women that she loves.”
When Avalon had the idea for “Hypothetically Speaking,” a tongue-in-cheek two-step about taking wrongdoing men out of the world, Butts was her first call. And if lines like “then you feed ’em to the gators,” don’t sell that it’s a murder song, the music video surely does (hypothetically speaking, of course).
“She’s a light, and is really fun to be around,” Butts says of Avalon. “She’s just a girl, just like me, doing this thing.”
But if “Hypothetically Speaking” was the coming-out party for Pink Pocket Pistol, it only represents a slice of the 14-track album. Its songwriting is modern and progressive, while its sound is vintage country, as though it were pulled straight out of 1960s Nashville.
Recorded at RCA Studio A in Music City and also featuring guest appearances from Jason Isbell (“Cardinal Sin”) and Midland (“Hickest Woman”), the album is as much a portrait of Avalon’s life as it is an ode to the mother and grandmother who raised her.
“I’m obsessed with Nancy Sinatra, and I’m obsessed with really strong, sassy, Southern women. I was raised by them,” she says. “In the South, you think a lot about traditional Southern wives — quiet and religious, tending the house. That’s not where I’m from. There’s an element of slight fear, and lots of respect, in the husband-and-wife dynamics, because the women are really kind of in charge. My grandma and my great aunts, they’ve all got big hair, and they’ve all got pistols in their purse, and they’ll all make you a pie. They’re the sweetest women ever, but you don’t want to cross them.” (Miranda Lambert, who herself projects an aura of danger, named her Texas boutique the “Pink Pistol.”)
Avalon’s family ties radiate throughout Pink Pocket Pistol. Her father is long-time Americana singer-songwriter Jim White; her mother is a painter. Avalon’s first word was “Elvis” and she started playing in church at 12. Born in Carlton, Georgia, Avalon left school and Georgia as a teenager. She lived in Los Angeles for a time, and later New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. A record deal at 18 fell through, but in 2021, she released a single, “Drivin’,” that caught Atlantic’s attention.
When she released Southern Belle Raisin’ Hell, Avalon chose a mugshot from an arrest as the album cover. When it came time to do the same for Pink Pocket Pistol, Avalon thought back to an old family photograph of her grandmother holding a shotgun on a beach in Florida, as well as a photo of her father holding the same shotgun. Avalon recreated both images for the front and back cover of Pink Pocket Pistol — with one key difference.
“I didn’t want a shotgun. I wanted something more beautiful and compact and little,” she says. “My granny always carried a pink revolver. I’m a gun-totin’ liberal. I have a revolver, and I thought, ‘This would be perfect.’ Everything’s always a reference to something within my family.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose upcoming book, Sonoran Sounds, is set for release in March 2027 via Back Lounge Publishing.
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