Less Of Me by Podge Lane: Album Review

by admin November 17, 2025

November 17, 2025

Less Of Me, the fourth studio album from rising alt-country shapeshifter Podge Lane, lands like a dusty postcard torn from seven months of sweat-stained stages, endless highways, and it arrives like it’s uprooting your whole life. After the rock-leaning theatrics of Multiple Dead Ends and a full European tour, Lane bolted from Ireland to the American South, playing over 100 shows and letting the audience shape the bones of the record. By the time he hit a sweltering New York heatwave to track the songs in makeshift studios, he’d carved out a travel-worn and startlingly intimate project. Lane calls the album a carnival mirror reflecting back the truth, some of it comes softer than expected, some much harsher, and that contradiction sits at the center of Less Of Me: the more he disappeared into the stories, the more sharply his own voice emerged.

Lane’s “Kicking Up Dust” opens this album with a gentle pulse that runs through the track, with the music warm and unhurried even as the story kicks restlessly forward. His rich, charismatic voice is worn just enough around the edges, as he sings, “So I am kicking up dust and arguing my case to who cares and giving people new reasons to stare,” like he’s talking to the night air from the side of an old back road. The heartland rock echoes of Springsteen and Prine hum beneath the surface, but Lane keeps things loose, relaxed, alive.

“Intro To The Story” slows everything down to a soft piano flowing like overhearing a quiet conversation from the next room. That gentleness folds neatly into “The Story,” where strumming guitars and shaking percussion frame a tale of someone who moves to the Upper East Side chasing progress and started writing a screenplay. Lane sings in a steady, storytelling cadence as drums begin tapping underneath, building tension as the narrative deepens.

“Oh To Be Alive” brings the album’s gratitude into sharper color, Lane singing enthusiastically while a harmonica trails behind him like a second voice, the guitars strumming bright and constant. New energy rises through each chorus.

Across Less Of Me, Lane balances bruised honesty with a wanderer’s optimism. It’s a record built on motion, on scraped-up truths, on the clarity that only comes when you finally leave home and hit the road long enough to miss it.