Noah Kahan is one of those artists who always seems to be on the charts, but who you couldn’t even hum a song from. Now he is also the author of the number 1 album on the Billboard 200, for the first time in his career, after selling 389,000 units.
Describing ‘The Great Divide’ as a rock album is not very accurate, but that is what Billboard considers it when it claims that the album has had the best week for a rock album since the end of 2014. It has also had the third best week of 2026, behind BTS’ ‘Arirang’ and ‘Kiss All The Time.’ Disco, Occasionally’ by Harry Styles.
Just with the first seconds of the title song it is clear that Noah Kahan’s music was exactly as one imagined it. Closer to folk pop than rock, ‘The Great Divide’ is reminiscent of Ed Sheeran, if he had grown up in Oklahoma.
Both the instrumentation and his own voice are reminiscent of things we’ve heard before, from Zach Bryan to Mumford & Sons. In this sense, it is somewhat generic. The detailed, ambiguous lyrics, on the other hand, are of the Taylor Swift school: “I hope you settle down / I hope you marry rich / I hope you’re only afraid of ordinary things,” Kahan sings.
I had read comparisons with Bon Iver, but these could only be applied to Kahan’s vocal timbre, which on songs like ‘Porch Light’ can directly recall Justin Vernon’s falsetto. Musically, however, it has nothing to do with it. Kahan would be much closer to The Lumineers than someone like Bon Iver. The irony? Vernon himself plays banjo and does backing vocals on the song ‘Downfall’, which definitely sounds like a cheap copy of early Bon Iver.
Between song and song, there isn’t much variety either, with ‘The Great Divide’ always maintaining that balance between indie folk and ‘stomp and holler’. We weren’t missing too much.
