Everywhere Isn’t Texas

August Ponthier’s story isn’t unfamiliar for a 21st-century artist: A musician goes viral through humorous TikToks; they sign to a major label; the label doesn’t know what to do with them. The Texas-born, Brooklyn-based songwriter’s music doesn’t immediately scan as such a tough sell: It’s lighthearted country-folk, the kind that put Kacey Musgraves and tourmate Brandi Carlile on the map (though Ponthier does have a habit of blurting out an unhinged line like “I wanna wear your skin!” in the chorus of a song). Regardless, Interscope dropped them in 2024, just as they were putting together their debut, Everywhere Isn’t Texas.

Then, in October 2025, in the final stages of mastering the album, Ponthier went public about one more major change: They came out as non-binary and changed their name to August. They’ve said the songs on Everywhere Isn’t Texas, which they wrote over a period of years, contain “Scooby-Doo-level clues” about their shifting understanding of their identity, and the album bears this out in its soft-pop portrait of an artist in transition. It’s a promising debut, but mostly errs on the side of safety—though Ponthier’s deeper, weirder urges still manage to peek through.

The Scooby-Doo clues unveil themselves immediately: In the first few tracks, there’s a song about mourning girlhood (“Ribbons & Taxes”) next to a confessional about gender envy (“Handsome”), a fascinating tension. Beneath the knowingly ironic girl-group production and clever rhyme scheme of the latter, the song is despairing: “Painted nails on gentle males/A winning combination/It’s painful and it’s shameful/I’m a poor imitation.” But then comes the song’s pandering bridge invoking “it-boys” Timothée Chalamet and Oscar Isaac, scurrying away from vulnerability and instantly dating the track.

A pair of songs on the back half, “Angry Man” and “Bloodline,” are thornier, exploring Ponthier’s struggle to embrace their identity while growing up in a toxic household. “Angry Man” reads like a fear of internalizing toxic masculinity, with lines like “I got his eyes and his unforgiving mouth,” and “reading self-help books to change/But I’m so scared it’s in my DNA.”  These songs embody a challenge many trans people face, particularly non-binary and transmasculine people—but more broadly, they might speak to anyone who sees their parents’ worst traits in themselves.

The production, largely by longtime collaborator Matthew Neighbour, doesn’t always do the darker aspects of these songs justice. Instead, it keeps the album in a cozy comfort zone compared to the more ambitious, dreamy songs on Ponthier’s early EP Shaking Hands With Elvis. But even the conventional instrumentation can’t stop Ponthier’s eccentricities from coming through—they talk about “Lady Bird-ing” themself out of a car on “Angry Man,” and “World Famous” has a befuddling non sequitur in “Sorry, Elvira/I’m pretty late for my date with Vincent Prince.” Without those quirks, their otherwise straightforward songs—like the Fleetwood Mac imitation “I’m Crying Are You”—would feel anonymous.

“Betty” is Neighbour’s best contribution, a racing ’60s sunshine-pop homage where Ponthier re-encounters someone once closeted to them in Texas and expresses a mix of admiration and aspiration (“Can you show me what it’s like?”). It’s the moment on Everywhere Isn’t Texas where the album’s content and form are most in sync, combining tasteful breakbeats and goofy chants. Yes, it’s a little bit cloying and sentimental (also the case for the adulting-is-hard anthem “Ribbons & Taxes”), but in aiming for a Muppet-y silliness, it’s just charming enough to work.

On paper, the title track and its reprise take that sentimentality too far: Even given The Wizard of Oz’s historical significance to the queer community, it’s risky for an artist to interpolate “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in 2026, and riskier still to do it twice. Yet these tracks do that while also getting across the album’s central dilemma: Do you flee your home when it’s getting too dangerous, or do you work on making the place you’re from better? Do you come out, or do you stay safe? The first song flees for greener pastures; the second song digs its ruby heels in, with a message that seems directly aimed at the trans teens who will likely find this record: “Everywhere isn’t Texas/’Cause the words and laws they wrote/Couldn’t touch our soul.” It’s achingly optimistic about the future of trans people without being naive. Ponthier doesn’t always strike the right balance of mischief and melancholy, but when they get it right, the mix is disarming.