Known Associates is the exhilarating follow-up to The Paranoid Style’s acclaimed 2024 album, The Interrogator, a veritable deluge of panic. A fever dream blending Van Morrison-style brass with a Leonard Cohen atmosphere, Known Associates confirms Elizabeth Nelson’s growing reputation as one of the most crucial singer-songwriters on the current music scene. Like her longtime idol Lucinda Williams, Nelson’s gradual rise has been accompanied by increasing literary recognition. She has notably collaborated with the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the Oxford American, and has written liner notes for reissues of Bob Dylan and the Replacements. Regal, eclectic, and filled with stories of bad luck, broken epiphanies, and thrift-store miracles that are sure to captivate fans of Richard Thompson, David Berman, or Tom Waits, the mystics and the statistics already say it: Known Associates is one of the best albums of 2026, and Elizabeth Nelson is one of the best singer-songwriters in the world.