Koe Wetzel has a soft side the size of Texas on his seventh album. Though he’s known for his rowdy personality, Koe Wetzel has a soft side the size of his home state. The Texas-born singer-songwriter has gradually revealed more of that side on each of his previous six albums, but this seventh studio effort is easily his most mature, even understated release yet. Wetzel credits that shift to “growing with age,” as he tells Apple Music’s Kelleigh Bannen, as well as a newfound interest in telling stories that aren’t always grounded in his own lived experience. “I felt like I was just in a different place, where I could write about something else other than my life,” Wetzel tells Apple Music. “A lot of the relationship stuff and the toxic stuff that’s going on, it wasn’t necessarily about me. But it could have been.” Like he did on 2024’s 9 Lives, Wetzel worked with producer Gabe Simon (Noah Kahan, Jessie Murph) to craft The Night Champion, making the most of the pair’s fruitful creative partnership. Simon is able to infuse his arrangements with a darkness without sounding dour, as heard on the album’s lead single, “Hurts Like You,” which finds intersection points in grunge, soul, and country rock. Other highlights on the LP include the tender Medium Build co-write “The Man,” on which Wetzel hopes he can live up to a loved one’s needs, and closing track “When I Was,” which features delicate harmony vocals from Maggie Antone. Below, Wetzel shares insight into several key tracks. “Sinner” “That song was one of the more rowdy songs on the record, and I knew that I wanted to start the record off with something like that to kick it off. It’s just about having a conversation with Him and, even after all the sinning and everything that goes on, you can holler at Him and everything’s going to be OK. We wrote it pretty quick, and we kind of threw it to the wayside, and then we came back two or three months later, and Gabe played it for us. He was like, ‘I don’t remember this song being this hard.’ So, we just put all our eggs in a basket for it, and it turned out to be a really cool song and ended up being the first song on the tracklist.” “Circus” “Sam Harris from X Ambassadors, he’s been a buddy for a while, and he wrote quite a few of the songs on 9 Lives with us. Hell of an artist, hell of a songwriter. It’s the only outside cut that we have on the record, and he sent it to me, and I don’t think he meant to send it to me like, ‘Hey, do you want to cut this?’ I think he just sent it to me like, ‘I’m proud of this.’ I felt like he should have been a part of this record and can’t thank him enough for letting us cut it.” “Hurts Like You” “That tune is just about going to something that is going to hurt you in the end, but you’re so addicted to it. I think toxic relationships are like country music’s bread and butter, because everybody goes through them, and they’re so relatable. Me and Gabe put together a really cool team of co-writers that love to talk about toxic relationships too. Whenever we don’t have anything else to write about, we always know we can write about a toxic relationship and get something half-assed out of it.” “The Man” “I wrote this song with Nick Carpenter from Medium Build, a phenomenal band, phenomenal artist. I knew I wanted to write a song with them just because I’d been a fan of them for a couple years. After we got the first verse and the chorus, we still didn’t know what ‘The Man’ was going to be or what people were going to perceive us as. And so, that was the cool thing about this song, because there’s a lot of different ways that people can look at it and interpret it. I think, for me, obviously, in the song it’s just living up to that standard or living up to that pedestal that she’s kind of put you on, like, ‘Am I going to be enough for her in the end?’” “Nowhere Fast” “Honestly, just sitting at the house with the girls and whatever it is, just going to play golf or sitting by the pool and relaxing a little bit—that’s kind of my reset these days. It used to be sleep. Now it’s a lot better whenever I get to take a nap with baby girl and relax a little bit. It soothes the soul a little bit and gives you that feeling of home.” “When I Was” “It was one of my favorite songs on the record because I’m a sucker for a sad, slow song. I had Maggie Antone come on for it. I can’t thank her enough for it because, honestly, it made the song what it was. It just gives you—hell, I’m getting chills talking about it—but it just sets the whole song on fire having her on it. She killed it. It’s really haunting, and it’s kind of having that sense of, ‘Now she’s gone, but I really missed who I was then.’ It turned out to be a really cool tune.”