Ashley McBryde doesn’t want to tell you how to feel after you listen through Wild, her fifth studio album—but she knows how she wants you to feel. “Imagine it’s really, really hot outside, and you’ve got your dad’s leather jacket on,” she tells Apple Music. “You just ran up a long driveway, and then you got into the house where the air is on, and you’re taking the jacket off. Or maybe you’re even standing in the front yard, and you get to take that jacket off and let it fall. I want you to go get on your bicycle and lean up against the handlebars and put your arms out and ride down the road. That’s what I want to happen to you.” Shrugging off a weight that no longer serves you—be it a heavy coat, an abusive relationship or something more abstract—and savouring the freedom that follows is a theme that permeates Wild, even if that release is hard-fought or a pipe dream. Produced by John Osborne of Brothers Osborne, Wild lays bare difficult and life-changing truths about family, faith, inheritance, addiction, marriage and so much more. She may be belting with all the might of her lung power on “Rattlesnake Preacher”, a full-throttle, Delta blues-invoking production that conjures the memory of her man-of-the-cloth father, or barrelling down on her guitar on the anthemic “Arkansas Mud”. But Wild has its tender moments, too, where the lyrics are loud and resonate in ways that have nothing to do with volume. “My bread and butter is acoustic-y, fingerpick-y songs that pull on my guts,” she says, and Wild serves up ample helpings of that—namely on the stunning “Bottle Tells Me So”, a candid look back on the epiphany that led her to sobriety (“If this ain’t bottom, it’s as far down as I еver wanna go”). “Lines in the Carpet” is a brilliant, poignant portrait of the unseen labour that can rot a marriage. “Hand Me Downs” has McBryde directly confronting familial trauma (“Daddy’s anger and his pride/My mama’s sadness, she taught me how to hide/There ain’t a damn thing that’s ever just been mine/I’m out here walking around in hand-me-downs”). None of these songs was easy to write or record—“Hand Me Downs” was especially difficult for her, knowing her mother would eventually hear it—but McBryde didn’t make Wild with the intent to coast. The healing, much like feeling the wind at your back on your bike, could come only after the work, and she’s known that from the start. “With this record, I had to figure out that part of the reason I was angry-slash-afraid was feeling unseen, feeling unheard,” she says. “And then, putting this record together, I decided I’m not going to tell a story about a lady in a trailer park who won’t wear her bra. I’m not going to tell a story about a guy who has a meth problem. I’m going to tell this story. Fear of never being heard and seen turns into fear of being known. And that was kind of crazy to grapple with, but it made for a great process.”