Tracey Nelson Shares ’86’, Another Soft-Country Cut From Hercules

Tracey Nelson has shared 86, the latest preview of Hercules, her new LP due 7/10 on Perennial/K. It arrives as a tidy reminder of why Nelson’s songs work best in the pause between things: unhurried, warm and perfectly attuned to that heavy-lidded, mid-summer haze.

The record, produced by MJ Lenderman and Colin Miller, draws on contributions from members of Wednesday, Hotline TNT, and Lenderman’s own band. Those collaborators have already surfaced across earlier singles — Dolly’s Coat, Just Shoot Me Now, and the title track — and 86 slots into that sequence as a quieter, more acoustic moment.

On paper the song is simple: an acoustic arrangement threaded with country touches, fiddle and steel guitar anchoring the melody. In practice it hangs on small details — the way Nelson’s voice fractures at certain notes, the patient space left between lines. The effect is intimate rather than ornate, the kind of thing that settles into your head because it refuses to rush you into anything.

The new video, directed by Hell Films, reinforces that domestic stillness. It follows Nelson through hotel rooms, slow TV wrestling sessions and low-key moments with a few very cute dogs, translating the song’s easy inertia into a series of small domestic tableaux.

Nelson’s Hercules is positioned as a summer record, but its strength is less seasonality than tone: a deliberate, languid set of songs produced and stitched together by a small network of contemporary indie players. 86 suggests she’s leaning into that palette rather than trying to color outside it, and the result is a record that seems content to be lived with rather than loudly announced.