To find that attitude, she headed back to her old stomping grounds: the great outdoors. Autumn spent time in the Tennessee woods. She booked a weekend in a rural treehouse outside of Asheville. She spent time at her friend's warehouse in Chattanooga, sleeping on the concrete floor at night and writing music during the day. Steadily, an album's worth of material began to take shape. "I like to put myself in extreme situations in order to write," she explains. "That's how I wrote songs like 'Jesus Heist' and 'In the South': by leaving everything behind and going into nature. Without the earth, I probably wouldn't have any music."

Back in her adopted hometown of Nashville, Autumn reunited with Isaiah Beard, the multi-instrumentalist and producer known as Baerd. The two had already worked together on "Electric Lizard," a viral hit that helped transform Angela Autumn from an old-world folksinger into a boundary-blurring, multi-genre musician back in 2023. With its sonic swirl of indie textures and abstract Americana, "Electric Lizard" served as a harbinger of new songs to come. It also showed just how wide Autumn's artistic reach could be. "Isaiah isn't a traditionalist at all," says Autumn, who chose to include "Electric Lizard" on Believer. "He's someone who loves pop and folk, so we both bring different things to the table. That's what makes the collaboration so great."

Working with musicians like drummer Ross McReynolds, the two spent an afternoon at the Club Roar recording studio, capturing more than half of Believer's songs in a matter of hours. After that initial session, they spent weeks working on overdubs, adding eclectic textures like fiddle, cello, keyboards, strings, and billowing clouds of reverb. Autumn had never spent that much time fine-tuning her albums before, and she made sure to keep things fun. "We were just playing around and goofing off," she remembers. "I doubled a lot of my vocals to accentuate certain things that I was saying, and Isaiah would sometimes stack six different guitar parts on the same song. It was an experiment in having fun and not taking ourselves too seriously."

Even so, the results are stunning. "Heavy Tobacco" is a swooning blast of psychedelic indie-folk, its melodies underscored by polyphonic, left-of-center grooves. "I Don't Think About You At All" pairs pop hooks an eastern-inspired banjo riff, while "Mountain Stream" pays tribute to Mother Nature with loping bass lines and glittering keyboards. These songs evoke the canyons and valleys of northern Appalachia, but they're certainly not rustic recordings. Instead, they're studio creations that mix organic performances with rich layers of sound.

With songs that tackle themes like self-reflection, imagination, and nature's ability to heal, Believer is caught halfway between nature and the landscapes we create in our own minds. It's Angela Autumn as we've never heard her before: experimental, eclectic, and caught in mid-evolution, pushing beyond the primitive twang of her Appalachian influences to chase down a cross-pollinated sound of her own making. Take a listen. It'll make you a believer.