With Hen’s Teeth, Sam Beam turns the darker side of Light Verse into something warm, intimate, and surprisingly inviting. Released February 27, 2026, on Sub Pop, the ten-song album was assembled from the same Laurel Canyon sessions that produced 2024’s *Light Verse*, making the two records genuine siblings rather than unrelated albums released in close succession. But where *Light Verse* often paired weighty subject matter with buoyant arrangements, *Hen’s Teeth* lets the music settle more naturally into the emotional gravity of Beam’s writing. The result is a reflective record about love, vulnerability, memory, and the complicated ways devotion can reshape a person.
The difference is immediately apparent on “Roses,” which opens the album with an unhurried, spacious arrangement that gradually expands around Beam’s understated vocal. Throughout the record, his familiar fingerpicked folk remains at the center, but the supporting musicians give these songs considerably more dimension than the solitary intimacy of Iron & Wine’s earliest recordings. David Garza, Sebastian Steinberg, Tyler Chester, and a rotating group of drummers form an exceptionally intuitive backing band, while violin, zither, mandola, tenor guitar, and other textures add color without overwhelming the songs. “Paper and Stone” is particularly effective in this setting, turning a simple metaphor about an uneven relationship into something quietly devastating.
The guest appearances are equally well integrated. The harmonies of I’m With Her bring an almost weightless beauty to “Robin’s Egg” and “Wait Up,” with the latter standing among the album’s most affecting performances. Beam’s daughter Arden also contributes backing vocals to “Grace Notes” and “Singing Saw,” adding an unusually intimate dimension to the latter’s intricate arrangement. Meanwhile, “In Your Ocean” provides one of the album’s biggest musical lifts, combining Beam’s contemplative songwriting with a more expansive, bluegrass-tinged folk-rock arrangement. “Dates and Dead People” takes things somewhere stranger, its long, wandering form and tropicalia-inflected feel giving the album one of its most distinctive moments.
What makes Hen’s Teeth work so well is the tension between sadness and comfort. Beam is clearly interested in the painful side of attachment, but these aren’t songs that wallow in despair. Instead, the arrangements repeatedly find beauty inside the melancholy, whether through the gentle swell of “Wait Up,” the layered textures of “Singing Saw,” or the six-minute drift of “Dates and Dead People.” There are echoes of Laurel Canyon folk and the exploratory folk-jazz tradition associated with *Astral Weeks*, but Beam and his collaborators never sound like they’re making a period piece.
The title Hen’s Teeth refers to something impossible—Beam describes the album itself as a gift that shouldn’t exist but somehow does—and that sense of unexpected abundance runs through the record. These are songs that don’t demand attention so much as reward it, revealing more detail as the arrangements settle in. “Half Measures,” the stripped-down closer, leaves things on an appropriately intimate note, allowing Beam’s voice and songwriting to carry the final moments. *Hen’s Teeth* may not radically reinvent Iron & Wine, but it doesn’t need to. It is a beautifully assembled record that shows how much emotional depth can emerge when a gifted songwriter gives his songs to musicians who understand exactly how much—or how little—to add.
– Jason Felton