Koe Wetzel is calling from Nashville, two nights into a recent visit to “a two-night town,” as this lifelong Texan describes country music’s capital.

“It’s like my new Vegas, bro,” says the singer and songwriter, last night’s festivities still audible in the weary scrape of his voice over the phone. “I’ve been here since Tuesday, and I’m ready to get the f— out.”

Wetzel, 32, made his name on social media as a larger-than-life purveyor of rowdy post-grunge country songs like “Drunk Driving,” “Something to Talk About” — “I could rob a bank in an old Mustang,” he sings, “I could fight the cops with my two bare hands” — and “February 28, 2016,” which proudly recounts the time he was arrested for public intoxication and spent a few days behind bars in Stephenville, Texas. (Fans now celebrate Feb. 28 as Koe Wetzel Day.)

Yet his stirring new album, “9 Lives,” reveals an older, slightly wiser hell-raiser: In “High Road” he’s a guy in a broken relationship opting not to buy “a ticket to your s— show,” while “Damn Near Normal” takes a hard look at the numbing excess of life on the road.

Produced primarily by Gabe Simon, known for his work on Noah Kahan’s double-platinum “Stick Season,” “9 Lives” is more polished than Wetzel’s five previous LPs, with nods to R&B and ’70s soft rock amid the echoes of Waylon Jennings and Puddle of Mudd; the tunecraft is sturdier too, thanks in part to Wetzel’s recruitment of such industry pros as Laura Veltz and Amy Allen, the latter of whom co-wrote Sabrina Carpenter’s 2024 pop smashes “Espresso” and “Please Please Please.”

As a vocalist, though, Wetzel finds new emotional depths in songs like “Sweet Dreams,” about his tendency to ruin a good thing, and a yearning rendition of “Reconsider” by the country songwriter Keith Gattis, who died last year. Another highlight is Wetzel’s bare-bones take on “Depression & Obsession” by the late emo-rap star XXXTentacion.

“I’m poisoned, and I don’t feel well,” he murmurs against a strummed acoustic guitar, the quiet confessions of one tough talker bringing a bleak kind of comfort to another.

“I just got a little tired of people thinking they know me based on stories they’d heard or from what they saw on Instagram,” Wetzel says from Nashville, where’s he touched down to promote his album between tour dates. “I wanted to show them exactly who I am — like, ‘Hey, this is me, take it or leave it.’”

So far, listeners are taking it. “Sweet Dreams” and “Damn Near Normal” have both racked up tens of millions of streams on Spotify and YouTube; “High Road,” a duet with the 19-year-old pop-country singer Jessie Murph, even cracked Billboard’s Country Airplay chart — a first for Wetzel, who until now seemed to operate at arm’s length from the mainstream country industry, establishing his fanbase on the road rather than pumping out a steady stream of would-be radio hits.

The way he sees it, country music has grown and diversified so much in the past few years — “You got rock, alternative, bluegrass, indie…,” he says — that “there’s no longer a stereotype of what the machine wants somebody to be.” (The ascent of Jelly Roll, a face-tattooed former rapper, suggests he’s right.) “The music being put out right now, it’s all over the place,” says Wetzel, who’s set to open for Nashville’s biggest star, Morgan Wallen, on Friday night at AT&T Stadium near Dallas. “I don’t even know if you can call country a genre anymore.”

Yet “9 Lives” reflects certain trends in the style, not least the embrace of the aggro rock of the late ’90s and early 2000s — behold the Shinedown revival — as heard in the work of Hardy and Warren Zeiders and Bailey Zimmerman. Wetzel in these songs also shares something with Zach Bryan, a fellow Nashville outsider who’s built a massive audience (and begun making inroads at country radio) by writing about his most intimate vulnerabilities.

Says Wetzel of making “9 Lives”: “It was like a therapy session.” Has he been to real therapy? “Not as much I should,” he replies with a laugh. “I grew up in a hard-working family in East Texas — kind of a men-are-men environment where you just take it on the chin and keep going. But getting older, you step back and realize it’s all right to talk about this s—.”

Koe Wetzel

(Hunter Hart / For The Times)

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Born in tiny Pittsburg, Texas — and named in honor of the outlaw country fixture David Allan Coe — Wetzel played football in college but turned his focus to music following a series of injuries. His success as a live act eventually drew the interest of Columbia Records, which released his first major-label LP in 2020. (He called it “Sellout.”)

Ben Maddahi, the singer’s A&R rep at Columbia, says the label’s chairman, Ron Perry, knew Wetzel was primed for a breakthrough even if Wetzel himself seemed unsure. “There’s a joke in here that Ron wanted a hit out of the country music star on the label and so he sent the Persian Jew from Beverly Hills to go down there and do it with him,” says Maddahi, who’s also worked with Wiz Khalifa and Pitbull.

Maddahi connected Wetzel and Simon for a songwriting retreat at Sonic Ranch, a studio near El Paso, where the producer “just sat there on the ground with Koe and my journal, and I asked him questions about his life.” The tunes came quickly, Simon says — several over two or three days at Sonic Ranch, then another several over two or three days in Nashville.

Not everything they wrote was as unguarded as “Sweet Dreams” or “High Road”: In the very funny “Leigh,” which plays like a riff on George Strait’s classic “All My Ex’s Live in Texas,” Wetzel considers moving to Memphis to avoid getting mixed up with women whose names end in “-leigh.”

But Simon evokes “Star Wars” to describe Wetzel’s mindset as they worked together. “You know when they’re on the Death Star and they’re like, ‘Use the Force, Luke,’ to shoot those torpedoes down? We had this little window before Koe’s armor was gonna come back up again.”

Some fans of Wetzel’s earlier, harder-edged material have responded with suspicion to the softer emotional terrain he explores on “9 Lives.” This month, Murph said on TikTok that she’d been called “a rat” for joining Wetzel on “High Road” and noted cheerfully that he’d dropped a version of the song without her vocals.

“His solo version is out now go get ur duis!!!” she wrote. (Murph’s representative said she was unavailable to comment.)

Yet Wetzel seems generally unbothered by the prospect of having turned anyone against him. Asked about his current attitude toward police, years after his last arrest, he laughs. “I’ve got a lot of friends that are on the police force — state troopers and stuff,” he says. “Whenever they’re not putting me in the back of a cop car, I back the blue.”

Seeing isn’t always believing in The Chapel, the latest film from Piggy writer/director Carlota Pereda. Written by Pereda, as well as Albert Bertran Bas and Carmelo Viera, The Chapel is a supernatural drama about intergenerational trauma between mothers and their daughters.

The film opens in 1631 in a small Spanish town that is besieged by the Black Plague. Men in plague masks gather up sick individuals to lock them in the titular chapel to preserve the health of the community and, as the crowd watches, a young, infected Uxoa (Alba Hernández) is separated from her mother, who refuses to help.

The moment of familial discomfort is upended, however, when a member of the crowd raises a smartphone to shoot video of the event, shattering the authenticity of the moment. It turns out what we’re seeing is a historical reenactment: these are actors who are playing a part in an annual five day festival. Once a year the haunted church is opened up and the town becomes a debauchery-laden tourist destination.

A similar instance of visual questioning occurs only a few moments later when characters walk through town and arrive at a painted facade two-stories tall that mimics the real street behind it.

Because these moments are so close together – and occur so early in the film – it is clear that it’s a larger part of Pereda, Bas and Viera’s subtle agenda. The Chapel is clearly interested in exploring notions of life after death, spiritualism, and belief, but the screenwriters also seemingly want the audience to evaluate what we’re seeing and what constitutes truth.

The heroine of the film is young eight year old Emma (Maia Zaitegi), an aspiring medium who is bullied at school because it’s a well known fact that her mother (Loreto Mauleón) is dying of cancer. Although the woman is effectively in hospice, Emma can’t bear to be separated from her mother, so instead of being sent away to relatives or into foster care, Emma is regularly babysat by well-intentioned neighbors, Edurne (Elena Irureta) and Asier (Jon Olivares).

The kindly adults are no match for Emma’s strong will and her tendency to sneak out, however, so her de facto surrogate parent becomes police officer Jon Elorza (Josean Bengoetxea). He’s the one who typically finds Emma in the middle of the night, unaccompanied, and performing spells to try and speak with the spirit of Uxoa, who haunts the chapel.

The plot kicks in when Ivana Peralta (Nagore Aranburu), the old “witch” Emma was studying under, dies of natural causes on the eve of the festival. Concerned that if her mother dies during the five days, her spirit will be imprisoned inside the religious site, Emma befriends the witch’s daughter, Carol (Belén Rueda) who arrives in town to settle the estate and manage the funeral.

Rueda is eminently watchable as the scowling disbeliever with a tortured backstory. Carol makes a living as a fraudster mystic, she actively tells Emma she hates children, and she stalks through town in her mother’s fur coat like a fury. She also wears her history, quite literally, on her face: the entire left side is badly burned, a detail The Chapel mines for a narrative reveal in the last act.

The skeptical adult/precocious child partnership isn’t new, but it works exceptionally well here because both actors are great. Zaitegi is especially revelatory: the rare child actor who negotiates the fine line between cloying, annoying, and dangerously mature for their age. It’s the centerpiece performance of the film and it only works because Emma is inherently worth rooting for, even when she repeatedly sneaks out after dark, engages in risky spiritualist activities, and actively courts the attention of violent ghosts.

Alas the film loses its way roughly halfway through. While The Chapel makes a clear throughline between Uxoa, Carol, and Emma’s “abandonment” by their respective mothers, when it comes time to confront the literal ghosts of their past, there’s nothing else to explore. The climax is particularly muddled, as the aforementioned “question what you see” element comes roaring back in a poorly shot sequence featuring a fiery pyre. 

It’s even more disappointing considering the spectacle that Pereda creates only moments before: a mountain of mutilated plague bodies piled on top of each other. This is easily the most haunting visual in the entire film, but it stands out in stark contrast to earlier unconvincing CGI on the Plague Mask ghost that regularly attacks Emma.

Alas, it is the horror elements where The Chapel falls down. There’s more mood and tension in a scene when Carol stumbles drunk through the town in the middle of night than most of the overly familiar monster attack sequences. 

The film works best when it is investigating the nature of female relationships between Emma, her mother, and Carol or when it explores Emma’s inability to process her mother’s impending death (fans of J.A. Bayona’s A Monster Calls will find this to be a suitable companion piece). 

As a female-centric drama with genre-adjacent tones, this is a strong calling card for Pereda’s talent. As a horror film, though? The Chapel is muddled.

The Chapel made its North American debut at the Fantasia International Film Festival.