Outlaw country-rock singer-songwriter Koe Wetzel became a big name among the Texas country crowd with his second album, 2016’s Noise Complaint. But the 2019 follow-up, Harold Saul High (named for his close friend and his uncle, both of whom he’d recently lost), made Wetzel a name to reckon with on the bigger playing field of the American musical mainstream. It came seemingly from out of nowhere, to those outside Wetzel’s initial milieu, stomping right into the upper reaches of the pop charts, before the young iconoclast had even been snapped up by a major label—which would happen soon enough. The amalgam of influences that Wetzel introduced on his 2015 debut album, Out on Parole, and codified more fully on Noise Complaint stands up and snarls at full strength here, intensifying the elements that were already in place and adding some new ones. Wetzel’s stoner sense of humor had popped up in his previous work, but with its extended spoken-word interludes, Harold Saul High is occasionally like a 2010s country version of a Cheech & Chong album, complete with bong sound effects. Beyond providing a smoke-enshrouded laugh, the most valuable effect of the humor is its undercutting of the lyrical intensity, which is amped up to a far higher degree than on Wetzel’s earlier albums. Things get gritty on songs of substance abuse and dashed dreams, as Wetzel throws expletives and unsavory images around with impunity. The tunes take a darker, harder turn stylistically as well. The churning rock guitars of the previous album get more explicitly grungy here, giving the louder tracks on the album (amid a fair share of ballads) more of a raging Nirvana roar than a Neil Young/Crazy Horse stomp-and-crunch. Any way you add it up, Harold Saul High was one of the more idiosyncratic albums to occupy the Country Top 10 in 2019, and for an artist not yet out of his twenties, it seemed like the promise of even more aggressively individualist statements to come.