Neil Young is back, and in all lowercase. His debut album with the chrome hearts, a newish backing band of Micah Nelson, Corey McCormick, Anthony LoGerfo, and the great Spooner Oldham, is a primal awakening for the greatest Canadian songwriter not named Joni Mitchell. John Hanlon calls Talkin to the Trees “in your face loud irreverent rock ‘n roll paint splatter on the canvas in the vein of a Jackson Pollock painting.” It’s a mouthful, but the man is certainly on to something. Co-produced with Lou Adler and recorded at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La, Talkin to the Trees is Young’s best full-length effort since, hell, maybe Sleeps With Angels? In the 31 years since then, he has put out some heat (“Chevrolet,” “I’m the Ocean,” “When I Watch You Sleeping,” “Milky Way,” “Ramada Inn”), and all of those aforementioned songs are terrific and worthy of a standstill, but Talkin to the Trees—even in its most imperfect moments—puts on display everything you could want (or reasonably expect) from the 79-year-old rockstar.
Of course, that assertion requires a bit of untangling. What does a “new” album from Neil Young even mean in 2025? Considering that this is the third LP he’s released this year—after Coastal: The Soundtrack and Oceanside Countryside—and considering that he’s put out Early Daze, Fuckin’ Up, and Before and After all since 2023, there is no true linear timeline in this man’s discography anymore. Since 2017 alone, five of the “lost” albums he’s released were pulled from his vault and featured tracks we’d known and recognized in other capacities for over 50 years. But Talkin to the Trees is brand spankin’ new—as new as World Record was in 2022.
And the chrome hearts are not Crazy Horse, though every member has his own history with Young: Nelson replaced Nils Lofgren in 2023; Young and Oldham have made records together before, namely Comes a Time and Harvest Moon; McCormick and LoGerfo are Promise of the Real expats (same with Nelson) who appeared on Earth, The Vistior, and The Monsanto Years. Just as the Santa Monica Flyers were an amalgamation of Crazy Horse and the Stray Gators in the mid-1970s, the players on Talkin to the Trees are Shakey Universe residents reshuffled into a new combination with a new name—originally assembled to pick up the touring slack after Crazy Horse’s 2024 North American tour was cut short due to health complications. But even in haste, the combination works. Neil Young’s contributions to rock and roll are so potent and omnipresent that any student of the genre can effortlessly fall into place with his ideas.
Young once said that all of his music is just one song. At one point, it was a clever rebuttal to a heckler’s criticisms. By now, it’s just a matter of fact. I won’t relegate him to AC/DC status, nor will I misconstrue his consistency as lacking innovation. Talkin to the Trees makes great use of Young’s toolbox and is kind to his history: There are acoustic sparks reminiscent of Comes a Time (“Family Life”); baffling compositional choices not unlike Everybody’s Rockin’ (“Lets Roll Again”); Hawks & Doves-style juke guitar (“Movin’ Ahead”). The gentle melody of “Talkin to the Trees” reminds me of Young’s Unplugged rendition of “Transformer Man,” while the rustic, Oldham-affected country flavor of “Thankful” could close out Harvest Moon.
And Young’s 48th album, just like many of the 47 albums that came before it, is marked by contrasts. Folk songs are succeeded by rowdy, muddy guitar storms. One moment, he’s railing against capitalism (“Lets Roll Again”); with his next breath, he’s singing to his wife and children (“Family Life”). When he’s not paying tribute to his tour bus with a campfire track (“Silver Eagle”), he’s spinning the rumors that he and his daughter Amber Jean aren’t on speaking terms after his divorce from Pegi Morton in 2014 into a nasty, misguided grunge lick (“Dark Mirage”).
Early surveys hinted to Talkin to the Trees being a political album. In the days leading up to Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration in January, the chrome hearts unveiled their first recorded offering: “big change.” The song is loud, sludgy, thrashing, and lyrically minimal. The music insists; Young implores the American people to reap what they’ve sown—you get what you vote for. “Might be a politician tryin’ to say something new,” he declares, vaguely. “Might be your decision, now you got to see it through. Might be bad and it might be good, big change is comin’ to you.” The refrain’s repetition blooms into a quaking, double-duty solo from Young and Nelson. A few months after, the band released the record’s worst song (and maybe one of Young’s worst commercial decisions since recording cover songs in Jack White’s Voice-o-Graph booth), “Lets Roll Again”—a “This Land Is Your Land”-style jam where Young asks Democrats and American car manufacturers to rise up in the wake of Tesla and fascism. “Build us a safe way for us to be,” he cries out. “Build us somethin’ won’t kill our kids.” But the garage-rock tempo rambles on a bit too quickly for Young’s clumsy vocal, and his gesture of political commentary is just as half-baked now as it was when he peddled “Alabama” as anything but a “Southern Man” rehash 53 years ago.
But the politics eventually recede, even when Young borrows from Woody Guthrie again on “Silver Eagle.” He sings about his tour bus’ choogling familiarity (“Many drivers behind your wheel, many songs now for us to feel. As we rode on through this country, Silver Eagle, you’re part of me”) with a sentimental lilt derivative of the cheeky affirmations that thread the clichés together on “Family Life.” In the latter, he praises the warmth of making music in the company of his children Ben, Amber Jean, and Zeke, and his wife Daryl Hannah. Not every line lands sweetly on the ears (“Singing for my best wife ever, the best cook in the world” is especially cringe), but the “Yeah, I’ll sing it from the heart. That’ll be the easy part” refrain is rewarding enough to forgive the track’s previous flaws. The bar-band blues of “Dark Mirage” not only shows off the looseness of the chrome hearts, but it argues that Young can still shit-kick with the best of them—as his deranged guitar riffs blister into a raspy growl, and his language pixelates a handsome image of his eldest son, Zeke: “Got my big boy, too. He’s so happy inside, found the right lover and they’re building the sky.”
Talkin to the Trees offers some of Neil Young’s strongest writing in years, maybe decades. “First Fire of Winter” sounds like a modern interpretation of “Helpless,” with sobs of drifting pedal steel and puffs of bruised harmonica pulling the melody into a mood you’d swear might have colored any of his recently unvaulted ‘70s albums, especially Chrome Dreams. “Breathe deep now, baby, ‘cause your dreams are your friends,” Young coos. “I will always be here with you, and the nightmares will end.” The vibraphone-wielding “Bottle of Love” sprawls with the same raw-hemmed might as “Danger Bird,” albeit without the head-splitting, chunky guitar solo. Young basks in the mundane on the title track, singing about shopping at farmer’s markets, dreaming dogs, Bob Dylan’s songs, and “waiting around for the world to change.” Its pastoral builds into Young’s finest lyrical conclusion in recent memory: “Might be time, time to get up. Today again, today again, today again.”
Talkin to the Trees lacks real cohesion, serving up an all-over-the-place buffet of singalong ditties, melt-your-face-off rock bombast, and vague political takes that aren’t catchy enough for surface-level redemption. Young’s penchant for fine-tuning has been waning ever since the ‘80s, but most die-hard fans are seasoned to withstand his unbalanced creative streaks by now. The highs are high and the lows are subterranean at best. And that’s that. By the time “Thankful” fades out, the question then becomes: Would you rather have Young spend almost a decade on one album (à la Dylan with Rough and Rowdy Ways), or continue to spit out new, unpolished material at the prolific pace he’s maintained since he rejuvenated his career in the ‘90s? Your answer will likely color your opinion of Talkin to the Trees, just as it did World Record, Barn, and Earth before it. Luckily, Neil Young is so damn good at what he does that even his most hurried material leaves room for some genius. I’d rather have “Talkin to the Trees,” “First Fire of Winter,” and “Bottle of Love” now than wait a half-dozen birthdays for something grand and all-consuming to fall into my lap. Maybe our greatest heroes aren’t meant to stay still.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
