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Long Cool World, the fifth LP from Los Angeles-based musician Patrick McDermott’s North Americans project, begins

with a plaintive strum, before Portland, Oregon-based Barry Walker chimes in with an expansive, melancholy arc of
pedal steel. It is a moment that seems both wide open and completely intimate, gesturing at the hugeness of the
natural world, while also taking comfort in the small moments.

As North Americans, McDermott has been experimenting with drone and noise and how it can take shape, and then
jettison that shape, since 2013’s No_No, but it’s when he embraced his love of fingerpicked guitar and vintage
country music on 2018’s Going Steady that he settled on a sound that felt like a genuine melding of his disparate
musical interests. 2020’s Roped In was another creative milestone: with Walker and a host of other collaborators,
including harpist Mary Lattimore, and guitarist William Tyler creating a communal, layered approach to each track that
felt vital as the world dipped into isolation during a global pandemic. “I knew that for this one I wanted to dial up some
of the textures and experimentation,” McDermott says.

In order to do that, Long Cool World, strips away most of the musical collaborators, allowing Walker and McDermott
to settle on an approach that is at once intricate and simple, creating hypnotic music that loops and layers, with subtle
shimmers of noise or quiet psychedelic freakouts hiding beneath McDermott’s unshowy but emotionally affecting
guitarwork and Walker’s pedal steel hum. The duo refined their collaborative relationship as well, with McDermott
sending isolated guitar tracks to Walker, who then listened to them while on drives and walks around Portland, before
going into the studio with only a loose sense of what he wanted to add to them. Eventually McDermott and Walker
came together to record the album, giving the whole thing a sort of free-flowing, naturally collaborative feel. “We were
really excited to dig into our own process in a more focused way together,” McDermott says. Walker echoes this
sentiment, speaking of how those guitar loops built into a full-fledged collaborative relationship: “There were times
when we played the organ together,” Walker says, speaking of the tandem organ drone of “The Last Rockabilly.” “We
sat down and it was feeding through the Leslie speakers and we were doing a drone together–it was a lot of instinct.”
At its core, Long Cool World is a confident album that finds its heart in deceptively simple moments: the pedal steel
cascading over McDermott’s strumming on “Think of Me as a Place” or the quiet burst of noise at the midpoint of first
single “Classic Water,” or the warm, drunk wobble of album closer “Bad Box,” are all moments that happily exist on
the periphery of the core sound of the record, but take center stage the more you listen. “This music is so simple. I
just didn’t feel like I needed more, where my instinct previously was to add more whenever it was applicable,”
McDermott says.

Though you may hear plenty of clear influences here—Long Cool World does exist firmly in the American Primitive
tradition, after all—there are a few that exist just under the radar, but offer up fascinating context to not just the
album’s roots, but how McDermott and Walker think about composition in general: guitar loops repeat until they
become abstractions of themselves, drawing inspiration from McDermott’s love of DC hypnotic hardcore
experimentalists Lungfish and the delicate compositions of Loren Connors circa Airs. Walker, for his part, draws
inspiration from older sounds—Michael Hurley’s deceptively simple guitarwork, Washington Phillips’ zither, the
“polyphonic harmonies of the Bosavi and Mbuti people,” and much more. “I draw inspiration from old forms,” Walker
says. “Ancient melodies that have tumbled and been rounded in the waters of oral tradition, settled into folk and
classical music, and then eroded again.”

This erosion, followed by a sort of contextual rebuilding, is a central theme found in not just the music on Long Cool
World, but the North Americans project as a whole. As if Walker and McDermott are perpetually seeking to answer
the questions: what happens when we create and collaborate instinctually? And how do we channel the
unpredictability of influence into a cohesive song cycle that seeks not to portray a single moment or memory, but
instead a state of being that is exactly as natural as the world it was borne from? Long Cool World doesn’t so much
answer those questions as it does sit with them, comfortable in the wild beauty of modern life.