Why Noah Kahan’s music is hitting especially hard right now

Noah Kahan’s new album “The Great Divide” picks up exactly where “Stick Season” left off four years ago – cruising down familiar Vermont roads on a speechless drive. On its opening track, “End of August,” a gentle piano fills the silence that “The View Between Villages,” the final track on his last album, ended on. It starts with two guys tagging along for the ride home: “They don’t say a lot, but know every inch of this drive,” Kahan sings. 

Similar to "Villages," the opening song builds momentum through the first chorus, tension rising from the bridge until a dramatic mellowing in the last thirty seconds. Kahan said he wanted “The View Between Villages” to “linger in that peace,” to represent the eventual stillness as he finally reaches home, and “End of August” holds that familiar sentiment. 

But feeling at home has been tricky for Kahan. The success of “Stick Season” radically changed his career, propelling him from rural New England into a best new artist Grammy nomination and then sold-out stadiums worldwide. In his Netflix documentary, “Noah Kahan: Out of Body,” he told his brother he wonders if he can be “fully satisfied in any setting at all.” 

“When I was in Hanover (or) Stratford, my life felt suffocated by it,” he said. “And then when I left, I yearned for it. You can’t just escape who you are because you moved to a different place.”

It’s a theme present on another standout track, “All Them Horses." He sings about crying on I-89, the interstate highway running through New Hampshire and Vermont, saying he’s “always on my own.” 

Days before its release, Kahan teased a snippet TikTok featuring the lyrics, “You know I’m gonna beat it, I wanna beat it bad. Everyone looks happy in a photograph. I crossed the county line, and I cannot go back.” 

Gen Z fans latched on quickly, using the audio to showcase their own mental health treatment journeys and designating it an “eldest daughter anthem.” 

"Just in time for my mid year mid life crisis, Friday literally cannot come soon enough," one fan wrote in a video with the song that's accumulated over 700,000 views.

Kahan, 29, is a Zillennial cusp baby – born between 1992 and 2002, toeing the line between Gen Z’s chronically online tendencies and Millennials’ self-deprecating humor.

I’m a Zillennial, too. I’m also from New England, but if you ask Kahan, he’ll say growing up in Connecticut doesn’t count. Having lived in New York for seven years, most days I’ll just tell people I grew up “an hour outside the city.” But in honor of “The Great Divide,” I’m reclaiming my New England roots, reminiscing on the year I spent in Boston, snow-covered beaches in my hometown, summer weekends with my cousins in New Hampshire, and the cozy CT town where most of my dad’s family still lives.

Like Kahan, I feel that sense of connection to New England so deeply in my bones. But you don’t have to have a certain kind of identity – or pain – to earn your way into Kahan’s fandom. 

What draws me to Kahan’s music isn’t just our New England synergy, but his raw depictions of struggling with mental health, body dysmorphia, and ultimately, the fear of inferiority. “The Great Divide” resonates with Gen Z not because it’s sad, but because it rejects both glamorized suffering and forced optimism — and instead offers space to sit with discomfort.

Kahan opens conversations without over-romanticizing mental health

In a time where so many artists are talking about mental health, it can still feel like the conversation somehow misses the mark. On TikTok, some people tiptoe around suicide with terms like “unalive,” or turn to tarot readers and therapists-turned-influencers rather than seeking professional support. 

There’s an overnormalization that happens: the idea of “it’s okay not to be okay” gets pushed so far that the struggle itself starts to present as trendy, or like an exclusive subculture. It’s reminiscent of the early 2010s on social media, when people flexed symptoms of depression or eating disorders to make them look chic or desirable – like sadness was an aesthetic rather than an experience or disorder. 

What a lot of young people, myself included, admire about Kahan is that he refuses to make any of it glamorous. He leans into self-deprecating humor, and sometimes that humor is clearly overcompensating for the heaviness in his songs. On “Downfall,” a song about cyclical relationships and emotional divides, the last four lines just repeat, “I’ll keep rooting for your downfall.” But those flickers of lightheartedness don't erase the weight of what he’s talking about; instead, it makes the heaviness bearable.

“Downfall” is not actually about wanting to see someone fail, it’s a story about not being able to let go of past connections. It's about being the one left behind and letting your loved one know it’s OK if they want to creep back. “I don’t mind being your dead end. I think it’s fine to never move on,” Kahan sings.

Kahan’s concerts let fans move through heavy emotions together

If you go to one of Kahan’s live shows, he'll likely talk about going to therapy or joke that his music is “for people with divorced parents.” In his documentary, he includes a clip saying his "goal was to leave you a little more depressed than when you came in.” Those lines get a laugh, but they also give listeners permission to feel uncomfortable feelings without being too overwhelmed. The humor in his artistry isn’t a way to trivialize mental health issues, it’s a way to survive them. 

Kahan has talked about the pressure he felt while making this album, the anxiety of needing it to be “better” than the last. On “The Great Divide,” he’s sticking with what he knows – odes to New England, musings on mental illness and finding humility in fame. It's not revolutionary, but luckily that's not a requisite for all good art. Kahan did the pop shtick before “Stick Season.” Then he made the folksy, stripped-down “Cape Elizabeth” in 2020, an EP which he says felt like a return to his roots and became the path that led to “Stick Season.” It worked – people loved it and it reminded him why he loved music. Instead of abandoning that in search of something shinier, he’s doubled down on honesty and storytelling. 

He says it's hard to describe what the last few years making the album has felt like − it's been a "collision of fear, pressure, joy and luck" that he only got through with the "stillness of my home state," "the steady and loving touch of my wife and family," and the constant support of his team, band, producers and fans.

"I am very proud of what we are doing together, and I hope we can live this dream for a long long time," he says.

The final “The Great Divide” track, “Dan,” is about death. Or at least, thinking about death while camping with his best friend, arguing about politics, drinking Miller Lite and talking about high school, trying to take in the moment before the night ends. 

“We’re so alone most of the time," he sings. “Where do we go when we die? I wouldn’t mind right here.” 

It’s that same acceptance he tried to leave listeners with on “Stick Season.” We’re back where we started, but maybe a little bit more at peace with that, and hopefully with ourselves too. For Noah Kahan, that’s the point.