Cuntry, the sophomore album from New York-based multidisciplinary artist Cleo Reed, is a love letter to folk music — a borderless music rooted in memory and a call to action. Black, queer, and non-binary, Reed understands that folk traditions stretch across geographies and genres, collecting the voices of those simply trying to survive. Across Cuntry, they tap into the legacy of working-class soundtracks — blues, dembo, zydeco, house, country, go-go — music that’s long served as a rhythm of resistance.

Here, music becomes more than sound: its currency, coping mechanism, and lifeline. “I Been Out Here Hustlin” is a soft call-and-response work song for the modern age. “Pass the time by scrolling,” they sing solely over light finger snaps. “Dayyyy innnn/ Dayyyyy outtttt.” Their vocals shapeshift (from schmoozy over trap beats on “Americana” to honeyed and processed on the sing-songy “Baseball”) across the songs’ varied landscapes. Cuntry unfolds like a map of Black American sound, its genre-fluidity paying tribute to generations of migration, labor, and transformation. The seeds of the project were sown in Reed’s own lineage.

“My grandfather was a blues musician in Texas. My mother did rodeo and migrated from Texas and Western Kentucky to New York City,” they tell me, long black braids falling to the side of their face. “She went through her migration. I went through my own — from New York to DC and then back to New York. My family is so spread around. By the time I was 18, I’d been to like 25 states.”

Cuntry has “that holistic understanding,” they explain. “It’s a documentation of being multiple, whether that be from being from multiple states, or being multiple genders or no genders.”

We speak over Zoom on one of the hottest days of the New York summer. Reed tells me this album was made out of “the necessity for survival.” It took shape during the pandemic, while they were working multiple jobs and still figuring their way through their debut album Root Cause. Travel became a catalyst for creative flow. Cuntry was a labor of love and a reflection on labor itself — on the rituals, exhaustion, and contradictions of working in America. What labor do we have to do for our souls, while also balancing the labor we need to survive for capitalist means?

Listen to Cuntry and read our conversation, edited for clarity, below.

You’d mentioned how you’d done a lot of word banks, journaling, and prep for this album which was different from previous projects. How come this was different?

CLEO REED: During the pandemic, I was working at Amazon and at Whole Foods, working doubles. I didn’t really have a lot of time during the day to sit down in front of a microphone and record. But I did have time to open up my cell phone and write down words and ideas that came to me. So that technique was born out of a necessity. It was a survival tactic for me to still have a sense of personal expression.

Whole Foods is what you’re talking about on the first recording, right?

REED: [Laughs] I forgot about that. Yeah, in the beginning of the record, I had a conversation with my friends about work. We all shared our stories, and I was talking about what was required of me to get hired for that job during the pandemic and what that was like.

Now, five years later, it doesn’t seem like anything’s really changed in terms of how we value workers.

REED: Where the pandemic comes in is me being able to recognize the deficits even more that we’re experiencing as workers and as human beings. My mom is a journalist and has written about social services my whole life. She wrote about city politics. City systems and questioning the way that they work is a huge part of who I am and the shaping of the things that I care about. So it wasn’t just the mass deaths and strikes that we went through that helped me understand that working people need help. For me, once the pandemic occurred, it was that isolation, it was a particular kind of pause that we all experienced that’s on another level.

In that year, I wasn’t even writing the songs yet, because I was still finishing my first record. I was journaling, and I had the title Cuntry of the record already. Unbeknownst to me that country music would blow up. And, that’s funny, but that’s life. That’s why life is so rewarding. Because our ideas don’t belong to us, they just belong to spirit and then we just tap in.

Were there moments or songs on the album that either felt comforting or were really uncomfortable for you?

REED: When I started to figure out the structure of the album, the second half, I knew I wanted to be a little bit more electronic. The first half is more guitar-driven and more folk-driven. They’re all folk songs to me. I think of them as a compilation of songs in that style, the way that those stories are important. Trying to create that dichotomy through the work was cool. It just started to get fun towards the end sequencing.

The first record and the last record, like “Salt n’ Lime” and “Nona’s Jam” have the same amount of instruments but are doing something totally different. “Salt n’ Lime” makes me want to lay in the grass and just watch the sun go by. But then “Nona’s Jam” I want to get up and dance and waltz across the room.

When I listen to that one and there’s mentions of just wanting to have a break and breathe, it makes me want to crash out on my bed.

REED: The song is named after Nona Hendryx, who is a really important Black femme music producer and pioneer in the ’80s. She produced for Talking Heads, and she was also a core member of Labelle, which was the group that Patti LaBelle had before she went solo. She’s still alive, and I’ve had the pleasure of working with her. There’s something really that resonates with me about this Black woman who is a producer, who has gotten a lot of accolade, but probably not enough and was so ahead of her time.

That record, there’s an effortlessness that I feel when I’m hearing it and when it was made that makes me feel like all is possible and that I don’t need to demand for people to be remembered or to be treated with respect, or to be given rest. That song makes me feel like whatever I call in will happen to me. It feels like the ultimate manifestation record. It feels really good in that way. In the way that some of the other songs maybe might make a listener compelled to speak up or think about things or organize or whatever. I mean, it’s cute! I love it. It’s so cute. Production wise, it reminds me of New York in the late ’80s or early ’90s, dancing outside and the Bronx and uptown where I grew up in Harlem. But then the vocal that I’m putting on it, I’m singing a folk record on top of this dance track.

It’s such a great song to end on. The album does a really good job of balancing playfulness and addressing really fucked up systems that we all have to coexist with and work through…

REED: It’s all a part of the grieving process. I think it’s the grieving process and understanding that what we may be living in may not always feel like a choice, and it may always feel like a little bit of an L, I guess. And I hope that my record can aid in that process of understanding. I grew up on songs like that, like I grew up in that Black exceptionalism, Black capitalism. I grew up seeing those things and wanting it and desiring it. And in the process of me becoming a worker and having to become a part of the workforce, I really started to understand the dysfunction. In the process of understanding the dysfunction, I first questioned it artistically, and then laid it in the record.

Thinking about memories of my parents flipping through coupons and getting excited, you know? And looking back on that in retrospect, with all that I know about wealth and the financial literacy because of the foundation they gave me, that I have the privilege of having now and understanding like, wow, that’s fucking crazy. [Laughs] There is a sickness to the system that we are living in right now. Where those pleasures become everything to us and encapsulate our worth as humans. I was the Black Friday Walmart generation. I saw people fight for TVs. I lived in Harlem when people would wait outside Atmos down the block once a week, V-files, Supreme. That’s the New York City that I grew up in from a consumerist perspective. I took it in, and I had no idea it would come to this record, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything else. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

There’s a lot of references to alcohol and a bar setting. I wanted to hear your thoughts on that.

REED: My parents met in Kentucky — whiskey, bourbon capital of the US. There’s no understanding of my origin without the presence of that substance in general. It’s not one without the other. There is no separation for me. I didn’t grow up in a household where people didn’t drink and smoke and whatever. So that’s one part of it. The second part is I was really inspired by my mom when I wrote that record with my friend. My friend was working in a dental office at the time, my roommate, she would come home from work. I’d pour her a glass of wine, and I’d make myself a cocktail, and we’d just talk. This was in 2021.

Then my mom, I was her road dog. So I have these memories of staying in after school programs — and this was a rare occasion, but being one of the last people to get picked up. My mom has a deadline. The paper’s due at midnight. We stay till like 12:30, we go to the bar after she’s drinking a Manhattan or a margarita or something, and it’s like one in the morning on a Wednesday. I’m sitting next to her at the bar, and I’m pretty young. It’s a really fascinating experience. Her work culture as a journalist, the bar is a huge part. After work we go to the bar. I draw a lot of inspiration from it, because I understand that we all need a reprieve and need some solace.

I think that’s why it’s the opener. It’s like my whole life experience. My perspective on the workforce. Trying to have that social criticism that feels not forced is funny.

I love that line “I sold my passion for a ration at the local bar.”

REED: Even what leads up to it is me fully articulating why selling your passion for ration at your local bar is hard, right? “The syndication runs a nation full of movie stars.” Celebrity culture is so deeply prioritized right now. Being famous, being seen as famous, seeming famous, is a whole thing.

“The eagle turns you gold, no matter where you are.” But my mom asked me if I was saying “ego,” which is funny. I am saying “Eagle,” but it’s the idea of it turning you gold, there’s an irony there and this idea of American imperialism. My family’s also military. So my grandpa was in Vietnam, and he struggled out there when he became a vet. I know there’s a big alcohol culture in the military at that time. I’m drawing from all those experiences.

I also love the conversation that the album brings in with country music or genres in general starting from the working class and they’re vacuumed up into mass culture. But it’s interesting how there’s a lot of criticism against celebrity, and then using these historically working class —

REED: It’s the bar song. I’m glad that you can hear that, that this is the bar song. The field song. The next song is the country song, the song after that is like the NOLA record, “Nine Lives.” All of them are cycling through these different styles of work songs that I’ve heard. Workers are the best people on Earth and best storytellers for sure. They’re gonna hit it out the park every time. A great artist will know that and surround themselves with people, with normal people to get their work done.

Were there certain songs or certain genres that you wanted to check off with the album? How did you essentially tie all of these together?

REED: These are different styles of folkloric music that I wanted to explore. I think that house music is a form of folkloric music, hence “Nona’s Jam.” Folkloric because it is tethered to a location, because it is tethered to a demographic of people, and it is tethered to a specific kind of call to action, right? Those are some of the core parts of a folk song that doesn’t necessarily — also within the Black diaspora we’re talking about Black American music.

I did make a mental list as I started to walk through my travels; I went to Atlanta, and there was a time where I was going to the strip club with the bottle girls. And I was in the club when I was 21. This was actually when everything started, the restrictions first started to get lifted. I lived in Atlanta for four months. And when I was in Atlanta, and I was in the club. I was listening to music, and hence “Americana” had to get made because of the setting. Not only is that song clearly very inspired by hip-hop, but there’s a lack of apology vocally. There’s an unabashedness; I-take-everything-on-the-chin energy; there’s confidence there.

And, that song is about giving the culture away, which is like another layer. What am I doing in this Black femme body when I’m giving the culture away? I knew I wanted to make a field song. I think the answer is yes. I knew I wanted to make a bar song. It started to happen and then it sparked more ideas and joy. Then, I started to have a lot more fun. “Da Da Da” started happening towards the end. It’s like a ride. It’s giving hoedown throwdown, trail ride.

That was definitely a choice that I made after I had understood that I was really collecting these different styles of work songs. Like, let me lean in and just go all the way there and get a banjo player on the record. I definitely am a nerd at heart and wanted to make those different styles for sure.

Cuntry is out now.