Molly Brandt

Molly Brandt found her current path in 2020 the way a lot of people took unexpected turns in their life journeys: looking for something to do during the pandemic lockdown. In her case, she picked up a guitar and started writing. She quickly discovered that she had a multitude of tales to tell—and a natural instinct of how to tell them. Like the storyteller himself, Tom T. Hall, Brandt knows just what to tell and what to hold back to fire up the listener’s imagination.

With a musical gift sharpened by years of training and experience—classical piano education from age five, show choirs in high school and college, performing lead vocals for her own jazz band after college—she was poised to take her pandemic project to the next level. When she applied those talents to roots music, everything clicked.

Brandt released her first singles in 2022 and played her debut Minneapolis show at the legendary West Bank bar Palmer’s. Since then she’s performed across the Midwest and beyond, at festivals including Blue Ox, Big Turn, Rochester Thaw, Boogiedown, and Boats & Bluegrass. In 2023 and 2024 she was named Americana Artist of the Year at the Midwest Country Music Awards.

On stage, she commands attention with statement outfits in the tradition of Nudie and divas like Nikki Lane and Margo Price, and powerhouse vocals just as arresting in a spare, open moment as in a wall-of-sound crescendo. Between songs she reveals her personality, down-to-earth and funny, yet unafraid to speak out against injustice.
Her debut album Surrender to the Night (2023) announced the arrival of an exciting new voice on the Twin Cities scene, with honky-tonk, countrypolitan and alt-rock woven through blue-collar stories of struggle, dive bar revelry, long car rides and cold-blooded revenge. American Saga (2024) pushed farther and wider, venturing into disco, blues, alt-country, bluegrass and psychedelia to tell a set of distinctly American stories: larger-than-life characters and unflinching looks at addiction, misogyny, capitalism and more. The album earned immediate media attention and radio play across the United States, with praise from the Star Tribune, Racket MN, The Current, The Bluegrass Standard and Adventures in Americana. The song “Mr. Texas” even landed on Netflix’s hit series The Hunting Wives.

Museum of Being, her third studio album, arrives June 12, 2026—premiering live at Icehouse in Minneapolis the same night—and it’s her most ambitious and personal work yet. Closely collaborating with producer/multi-instrumentalist Eric Julio Carranza, her musical partner and fiancé, Brandt wrote and recorded the album in their basement studio, which they call the Museum of Being. It was the first album fully recorded and mixed at home, which gave Brandt and Carranza a profound sense of creative ownership.

The album’s central idea is how the accumulated weight of memory, nostalgia and time makes each person a museum, with every experience a kind of exhibit. Each song is is a vignette of the human experience, some of them intensely personal: Her father Blake Brandt appears on “Grizzly Rose” (named after a Denver nightclub), a duet that traces her love of country music back to its source: her parents two-stepping at that club. It’s a way for her and her father to memorialize her mother—who passed away several years ago—and the legacy of love and music she left behind.

But the concept stretches beyond personal recollection into collective memory and American history: the burning of the Library of Alexandria as a metaphor for our ongoing erasure of knowledge and culture; the existential crisis that was the Dust Bowl reflecting the ecological disaster we face now; an unvarnished reckoning with the long history of violence woven into the American story. First released as a fundraiser for immigrant rights organizations, “Do You Possess an Iron Will” was written during the ICE occupation of Minnesota—pondering a question Brandt asked herself daily about what it takes to stand up to fascism and brutality.
Brandt is good enough at nailing the classic country sound, and writing lyrics that fit right into the oeuvre, that she could easily make her mark with throwback waltzes and two-steps. But it’s clear her restless creative mind will never let her stay for too long in one place. Museum of Being ventures farther into experimental territory than anything she’s made before. Electric guitar snarls and fuzzes alongside swoony orchestral effects; pedal steel coexists comfortably with stuttering electronic beats; Brandt’s vocals are sometimes drawn back to a distant echo before bursting urgently into the foreground. Spare acoustic moments grow into slow-burning atmospheric pieces and full-throttle psychedelic romps, all held together by Carranza's production work and Brandt's confident artistic vision.

Even when the new album reaches its most daring extremes, Brandt’s honky-tonk roots are never far. The push and pull between tradition and restless innovation is what makes her one of the most distinctive voices in the independent Americana scene. She came in swaggering with classic country and has never stopped moving. The museum of being Molly Brandt keeps accumulating exhibits.