In My Blood

Cody Jinks is proving to be one of outsider country music’s more prolific artists, releasing this LP just a year after dropping a trio of projects in 2024: the studio album <i>Change the Game</i>, a remastered re-release of 2012’s <i>30</i> called <i>Backside of 30</i> and the tribute album <i>Cody Jinks Sings Lefty Frizzell</i>. This is no collection of cutting-room-floor material, though, and it shows the grizzled Texan at the top of his game as a vocalist and a bandleader. As he has for most of his albums, Jinks recorded <i>In My Blood</i> at the famed Texas studio complex Sonic Ranch, with Joshua Thompson and Charles Godfrey producing. Jinks and his band the Tonedeaf Hippies don’t reinvent the wheel here, instead leaning into the hard-rock-informed Texas country that put him on the map. Highlights include “Lost Highway”, a dark and brooding meditation on life’s mysteries, and “Something Wicked This Way Comes”, a harmony-rich midtempo rocker that plays off the Ray Bradbury horror novel of the same name. Jinks closes the project with “When Time Didn’t Fly”, a raw and nostalgic ballad that shows the emotional depths of his singular voice.