An artist untethered from time or place, Alex Amen crafts music that feels eternally familiar, yet strikingly new – shaped by a wandering spirit always in motion. Since leaving his Texas hometown at 18, Amen has followed a restless curiosity and a love of songwriting across the country – from a commune in Southern California to a trailer in Hollywood, years on a remote Washington island, life on sailboats and rock climbing out of vans, and most recently, the pulse of New York City. With only an EP, a handful of singles, Alex landed on the 2025 lineups to elite festivals like Pitchfork London, Newport Folk Festival, and Austin City Limits, swiftly winning over audiences with his soulful breed of songwriting. Newly signed to ATO Records, he now makes his full-length debut with Sun of Amen: a body of work that opens a space for sustained and quiet wonder, offering up songs touched with both ease and beauty.

As a kid growing up on the Gulf Coast, music and nature first became entangled in Alex’s earliest years during family road trips to Colorado, thanks to his parents’ tradition of putting on John Denver’s Greatest Hits right when the Rockies came into view. “The feeling of that music playing as we headed toward the mountains was very impactful for me,” he says. “It was like a whole new world opened up, and I realized life had more to offer than pop radio. It showed me emotions I didn’t know I had.” After taking up piano at four (and studying with the same Houston-based jazz pianist through the end of high school), Alex started playing guitar in mid-adolescence after discovering the likes of Nirvana and Neil Young. Although he later enrolled in film school in California with the intention of making documentaries about rock climbing (one of his lifelong passions), he dropped out after one semester to focus on music full-time. Within weeks, he’d moved into a historic commune in Anaheim where he soon started his first band, a psychedelic folk-rock outfit named American Slang. “The commune was a crazy place to live—there were hippies and punks and skaters, all in this beautiful house that used to be on six acres of strawberry fields but now it’s surrounded by strip malls,” says Alex. “The house was owned by a professor who’d bought it in the mid-’60s and still lived there with his family, so it had this fascinating history with the anti-war movement and renowned civil-rights/psychedelic activists from that time. We’d have these big communal meals every day and debate art and God and food and politics. It was a pretty amazing place to live for a while.”

After eight months at the commune—and a brief stint living in a trailer on the property of a famed Hollywood composer—Alex set off for Vashon, an island in Washington’s Puget Sound,

where he moved into his then-girlfriend’s family home in the early days of Covid. “My girlfriend was working a very stressful job and dealing with the loss of a family member, and I ended up spending most of my time alone,” he says. “I decided to go to music school with all my spare time during Covid and became almost like a monastic musician, to the point where I was practicing guitar up to 12 hours some days.” Determined to gain greater mastery over his playing, he found a guiding light in the world of traditional American and roots music. “I started taking a ferry to bluegrass jams and studying all these musicians who had amazing technical prowess—it took me back to the awe I’d felt watching my piano teacher as a kid, and made me want to have the same kind of freedom with my instrument,” says Alex. “After three and a half years, I was a much different player than when I first got to the island.” 

Just before leaving Vashon (where his pursuits also included mountaineering and boat building), Alex headed down to Zorthian Ranch (an artist colony in Altadena, California) and cut his first batch of solo recordings—a self-produced seven-song project titled The Zorthian Tapes. After moving into an Altadena home with the musicians who’d accompanied him for those sessions, he began sharing songs from the EP in late 2024 and quickly caught the attention of industry insiders, soon inking a publishing deal with Rick Rubin’s American Songs. While navigating a fast-growing live schedule (including performing alongside the likes of Lucinda Williams and Taj Mahal at the 2025 Luck Reunion on Willie Nelson’s ranch), Alex returned to the studio and recorded Sun of Amen, completing the album prior to signing with ATO Records in early 2026.

Produced by Alex and engineered by Jonny Bell (Cage the Elephant, Chicano Batman), Sun of Amen matches its old-soul warmth with an astonishing clarity—the natural byproduct of his reverence for classic records and ardent refusal to chase nostalgia. “It could be easy to fall into the trap of trying to make something intentionally sound rough because you want it to feel old, but if you listen to a record like Blue by Joni Mitchell, it’s so unbelievably modern and hi-fi,” he says. “With this album we were meticulous about creating something high-quality while recording in a more traditional way, which has its own challenges—older gear is temperamental, so sometimes we’d have to break for three hours because the tape machine caught on fire.”

Partly recorded at the legendary Valentine Recording Studios in L.A., Sun of Amen unfolds with a rich sonic depth achieved with the help of an expansive lineup of musicians, including several of Alex’s longtime bandmates. Over the course of its 11 songs, the album’s lush and unhurried sound serves as a potent backdrop to Alex’s storytelling. To that end, Sun of Amen opens on the heavy-hearted sprawl of “Diamonds” (a wistful reflection on life and love gained and lost during his time on the West Coast), then drifts into the harmony-laced reverie of “Cabin By The Sea” (a lilting look at his charmed but lonesome insights from his years on Vashon). On “Her Spirit Wanders,” he shares an awestruck ode to a group of fiercely driven female hikers and climbers he encountered during many summers spent in Yosemite National Park, while “California Blues” arrives as a homesick traveler’s song illuminating the uneasy contrast between the quintessential California dream and its lived reality. Elsewhere on Sun of Amen, Alex brings his tender yet commanding vocals to more inward-looking tracks like “Memories of You” (a heartbroken piano ballad graced with a symphonic string arrangement) and “Changes” (a gorgeously languid meditation on impermanence and surrender, adorned with luminous organ lines and resplendent flute melodies).

Now living between Texas, California, and New York, Alex’s latest excursions include sailing from Washington to Canada last summer on a sailboat he restored on his own, to big wall rock climbing in the Sierras, and now integrating himself in the growing folk scene of Brooklyn. As he moves into a new chapter of his journey, music and the natural world remain parallel forces in his life, providing an endless source of fortifying joy. “I think it’s important for everyone to have a physical connection with nature, partly because it creates more of a desire to make sure we’re not destroying the planet, but it’s also good for humans on every basic level to move and be outside. The better you take care of your body and the world and the people around you, the greater amount of good life gives back to you,” says Alex. “It’s the same thing with music—I think I’ve been very blessed in the sense that music has always been something I’ve done because I love it; it’s never felt forced to me. I really just love the way it feels to play music, and I’ve found the more you chase it and live with an open heart, the more life brings you songs.”