Review: Madison Cunningham’s ‘Ace’ Fuses Nylon-String Nuance and Electric Bite

In poker, the ace is the most paradoxical of cards—it can win big or lose everything. On Ace, her third full-length album, Madison Cunningham explores this duality, playing that card again and again, uncertain whether it will crown her or break her.

Ace follows Revealer, Cunningham’s 2022 Grammy winner for Best Folk Album. That record’s standout ballad, “Life According to Raechel” (transcribed in the January/February 2023 issue), was also nominated for Best American Roots Performance, a category that, like Cunningham herself, resists easy classification. Before that came Who Are You Now (2019), her first album for Verve Forecast and a Grammy nominee in the Americana category—another tag that only partly fits.

Since then, Cunningham has become a quiet fixture in the world of musicians’ musicians, collaborating with Remi Wolf, Lake Street Dive, and Jacob Collier, and sharing stages with Chris Thile. Last year, she joined Andrew Bird for Cunningham Bird, a full-album cover of Buckingham Nicks, the 1973 record Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks made before the Fleetwood Mac years.

This new 14-song release traces both emotional and sonic extremes. It’s an album full of in-between states: the moment after the breakup but before the healing, the silence between what we mean and what we say. The arrangements shift constantly, with Cunningham’s guitar and piano moving between folk and art-rock. Her ’60s Harmony classical guitar and Gibson ES-330 electric (strung with D’Addario flatwounds) remain the backbone, grounding unexpected textures in a sound that’s become her signature: nylon-string intimacy offset by wiry, angular electric lines. She combines syncopated, percussive rhythms with open-string voicings and surprising harmonic turns, a style that makes her parts feel both propulsive and unsettled.

Longtime collaborator Robbie Lackritz (Feist, Bahamas) keeps the mix spacious but grounded, with a warm, high-fidelity balance that lets the songs breathe. Multi-tracked vocals, layered woodwinds, chamber instrumentation, and unconventional percussion add movement and color. Rob Moose (Bon Iver, Phoebe Bridgers, yMusic) contributes strings to tracks including “Skeletree,” “Golden Gate (On and On),” and “Beyond That Moon.”

With writing and co-production credit on all 14 tracks and a multi-instrumentalist role spanning guitar, piano, celesta, and percussion, Cunningham builds music that feels both exploratory and rooted. She’s at her most deliberate here: an artist who doesn’t confuse vulnerability with catharsis, and who shows how a song can hurt and heal at once.

In “My Full Name,” the first single, she sings, “Love’s a kind of sorrow worth saving”—a line that signals she isn’t pleading for resolution. She’s sketching the outlines of uncertainty, letting the gaps do some of the talking.

Just as the ace can be high or low, the listener is pulled between dominance and desperation, each track brushing against resolution only to pull back or burst forward. These deceptive cadences suggest closure before swelling again or fading like a lost thought. And always, just when it seems the songs might overtake the singer, Cunningham leans in with a growl that shows she is anything but fragile.

In “Goodwill,” she sings, “Sympathy in the late stages/ Trailing the big wide curve/ Squint your eyes/ ’Til everything’s pink/ Set flame to the vagus nerve.” It’s a surreal image that embodies the album’s bodily sense of pain and release.

Ace is not just about states of mind; it’s physical too, where nerves and muscles carry memory and tension. Like the playing card that names the album, these compositions hold both ruin and revelation, control and surrender. They move with melody and muscle, mapping out catharsis without the need to pin it down.

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2026 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.