Jobi Riccio – Face The Feeling
Today, Nashville-based songwriter Jobi Riccio has announced her new album Face The Feeling, due out May 15 on Yep Roc Records.
Co-produced by Riccio and longtime collaborators Isaiah Beard and Jesse Timm, the new record marks a bold sonic evolution for the Americana Honors & Awards Emerging Artist of the Year nominee and a John Prine Songwriters Fellowship honoree. Expanding beyond the folk and country foundations of her breakthrough debut album Whiplash, Riccio moves toward a more electric, indie-rock-driven sound on Face The Feeling.
That sonic shift mirrors a deeper emotional reckoning at the core of the album. Where Whiplash chronicled coming of age and the search for escape, Face The Feeling finds Riccio confronting emotions she once tried to outrun – grief, rage, self-doubt, and desire – and choosing to sit fully inside the discomfort. Riccio treats each emotion as something unavoidable and illuminated, like a billboard flashing into view at full speed.
Written between Colorado and Nashville, Face The Feeling balances light and dark, restraint and release, ecstatic highs and mournful lows. From the rich album opener “A Little at a Time,” to Riccio’s hopeful love song “Idaho,” to the slow-burning, anthemic closer “Doesn’t Matter,” the collection emerges as an exquisite excavation of self with sharp clarity and confidence.
Riccio previewed the album late last year with pre-release singles “Wildfire Season,” which Ann Powers deemed “protest music at its finest” in NPR Music’s “Best Songs of 2025” list, and “The Ridge.” Last month, she released the gritty “Buzzkill,” which Stereogum called “a spunky, catchy salt-of-the-earth rock song.” Stereogum also noted, “We named Jobi Riccio’s debut Whiplash one of the best country albums of 2023, though her music has at least as much to do with alternative rock.”
Today, Riccio has shared the new single “Pilar, NM,” which features the album title in the lyrics: “Make myself turn and face the feeling / And sit inside of it.”
A restrained, quietly powerful track, the song explores devotion to the things that matter most, even when they’re difficult to hold onto. Built around Riccio’s unguarded vocal delivery, “Pilar, NM” distills the album’s emotional core. “I’ve always been a pretty open book,” Riccio says. “But allowing myself to be challenged and learning the power of letting go was a big part of developing this album.”
With Face The Feeling, she pushes beyond expectation toward her most confident and expansive work to date.
“I wanted to create a place – for myself and for others – to face the good, bad, and ugly feelings,” Riccio says. “Even when the noise of the world gets overwhelming.”
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