AMY TURNER

When you listen to a Lauren Talley song, you can usually hear it coming, where the polish drops away and something rawer takes over. It’s not a performance trick. It’s the whole point.

“When I step behind a microphone,” she says, “my most important job is to help the listener encounter the presence of God.” That sentence could double as a mission statement for her upcoming EP, Walls (Part One), out August 21 on Horizon Records and available now for pre-save.

Talley has spent years building a career inside Southern Gospel’s tight-knit world, but this project stretches past those borders. Working alongside producer Jason Webb, she folds inspirational, worship and contemporary Christian elements into the genre’s familiar bones, and the result feels less like a genre exercise and more like five different rooms in the same house of faith.

“In Walls (Part One),” she explains, “we can feel Him in the rhythm and soul of ‘Walls,’ and in the high energy of ‘So So Good.’ He shows up in the vulnerability of ‘Mercy’ and ‘Little Faith,’ and we can give Him all of our worship in the awe-inspiring lyrics of ‘Look At The Lamb.'”

That range is the project’s real achievement. “Little Faith” and “Mercy” open quiet, almost confessional, like Talley is singing to one person in a dim room. By the time “Walls” and “So So Good” kick in, the arrangements widen and her voice climbs with them, bold and unguarded. The closer, “Look at the Lamb,” a song she wrote herself, builds toward a full throated finish that feels earned rather than performed.

The lyrics shift moods just as freely, but two threads hold the whole EP together: power and grace. On the title track, she sings of a God who flattens every obstacle in His path: “He ain’t never met a wall / That He couldn’t tear down / Watch it crumbling to the ground.” On “Mercy,” the tone turns personal and grateful, a testimony of survival rather than triumph: “Now I’m alive to tell the story / How I’ve overcome / It’s His goodness and mercy / And the power of His blood.”
For Talley, the variety in sound is never the destination, just the vehicle. “Throughout every song I sing,” she says, “regardless of style, I want to take the listener on a ride through all the times we spend with the Lord, and point all the focus back to Him.”

That instinct has guided her since long before she had a record deal. Lauren Talley sang her first solo at age two, toddling onto a stage mid-concert to announce, in toddler logic, that she wanted to “thing.” She grew up to make good on that announcement as part of her family group, The Talleys, lending lead vocals to eleven number one hits and helping the group take home a 2015 Dove Award for “Hidden Heroes.”

Her solo catalogue runs seven albums deep, including the rare move of releasing two records the same day in 2019: Glorious God: Songs of Worship and Wonder and Loudest Praise: Hymns of Mercy, Love and Grace. Her 2017 record, The Gospel, hit number one on Billboard’s Southern Gospel chart, and she’s also written Songs in the Night, a devotional book paired with her 2010 album of the same name. She’s a regular presence on Gaither Homecoming videos and concerts, RFD-TV’s The Music City Show, and In Touch with Dr. Charles Stanley, and in 2014 John Wesley University awarded her an honorary doctorate in Worship Arts.

Off the road, Talley works as a studio background vocalist and producer, and mentors emerging singers as a voice and performance coach. And when she’s not doing any of that, she’s cheering on the Tennessee Volunteers, sipping sweet tea, and making time to laugh with the people closest to her.

Walls (Part One) feels like the natural next step in that long arc: an artist who has spent her whole life pointing toward something bigger than herself, now doing it with a wider musical vocabulary than ever. Pre-save the EP ahead of its August 21 release.