Every My Morning Jacket Studio Album, Ranked

“I’m not a hippie, and I’m not not a hippie” — this is what Jim James told Uproxx’s own Steven Hyden in 2008 and I propose the same is true of My Morning Jacket being a jam band.

Yes, they’ve been known to play four-hour live sets, including the one that served as their coronation for “house band at Bonnaroo,” the jammiest of all major festivals. They love pulling out surprise covers and pushing six-minute songs to eight or ten minutes with extra guitar and saxophone solos. I don’t really know how to evaluate metrics on nugs.net, but when I click “featured artists,” My Morning Jacket is in the top eight. That has to mean something.

On the other hand, how much do My Morning Jacket really jam? There are multiple My Morning Jacket shows I’d describe as “life-changing,” ones that have taken place in small clubs and vast, outdoor amphitheaters. But improvisation never seems to be a big part of the experience: Most of the songs just sound like longer, louder versions of what appeared on the album, and take on similar forms from show to show and year to year. And about those albums, here’s the most compelling evidence against My Morning Jacket as a jam band: the live shows are a crucial component of appreciating what they do, but not essential. How many true jam bands can you say that about? In fact, it’s not hard to imagine people who became My Morning Jacket fans entirely off their studio albums, because they’re people I know in real life. That’s not a slight against them, My Morning Jacket albums are just that good.

Well, some of them. Most of them, really. Especially if we’re talking about their first four, which I took as incontrovertible evidence that My Morning Jacket was the greatest American rock band of the (still fairly new) 21st century. I will no longer make that argument in 2025, because I will amend it to “one of the greatest,” and stress that, hey, you really gotta see ’em live to get it.

My Morning Jacket’s tenth album, Is, is out this Friday and is really annoying to write about because it’s difficult to describe it without using the word “is” twice in a row. It’s also tricky to write about because it follows my choice for, by far, the worst My Morning Jacket album and is thus likely to be graded on a curve. It’s nice to have them back, and it’s nice for them to have a reason to go back out on tour before Z celebrates its 20th anniversary this fall and reminds me of the level at which they were operating in the mid-2000s. (I declined to include 2006’s officially released, double-live album Okonokos on the list, even if it was a priceless cheat code for MMJ evangelists back then as both a document of the greatest live band going and a greatest hits at a time when their catalog was a bit unruly.)

On a song-by-song basis, My Morning Jacket can still reach that level, though as my Indiecast co-host argued in his “Best My Morning Jacket Songs” list from 2021, they’re topping out at “maybe their 27th or so best song.” But again, how many true jam bands can you say that about 25 years or so in? As the man said, let’s ohhhh sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiit ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuun through the My Morning Jacket catalog, from worst to best.

10. My Morning Jacket (2021)

In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s shocking 2016 electoral victory, subscriptions to New York Times and The Washington Post skyrocketed, as did ratings for CNN and MSNBC. This all stemmed from an earnest, honest belief that our collective vigilance was the only thing that stood between doddering democracy and full-on fascism. That obviously didn’t pan out and what we got instead were millions upon millions of previously unplugged Americans “living inside the news,” as pop psychologist Oliver Burkeman put it — people from whom you once received fantasy football tips or The Bachelor intel or Nextdoor updates now fancying themselves as amateur geopolitical experts, treating congressional hearings and down-ballot elections as the main event in their lives, with jobs and family something they occasionally checked in on. There was an inevitable trickle-down effect into pop culture as well, as urgent and important political art was crowded out by countless musicians who now confused their righteous indignation and good intentions with having something new to add to the discussion.

Such as My Morning Jacket. This wasn’t supposed to be the takeaway from their 2021 self-titled, which was promoted as a complete overhaul of their creative process after their longest hiatus. Jim James and company reverted back to self-production and painstakingly spliced together hours worth of jams into proper songs, like they were Miles Davis, Can, or Talk Talk. Unfortunately, the lyrics read like a collage of #resistance bumper stickers, with James expounding on social media (it’s bad), racism (it’s bad), the mall (it’s bad), and love (it’s good and the more you give, the more you get).

But maybe that’s just me — most critics ran with “rejuvenated” and “best since Z” anyway. Fair play, since in the fall of 2021, people took whatever they could get to remind them of the “before times,” and “hearing My Morning Jacket play nine-minute songs live” was a part of that, even if it involved hearing James recap the most recent season finale of Stranger Things. For better and (mostly) worse, My Morning Jacket is truly a record of its era.

9. Is (2025)

The presence of Brendan O’Brien immediately suggests is as a course correction from My Morning Jacket. After all, this is a producer best known for setting hard boundaries on headstrong, jam-friendly rock institutions better known for marathon live shows (Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen, Mastodon… yeah, I guess Incubus counts, too). And wouldn’t you know, after weighing My Morning Jacket down with grueling epics like “Devil’s In The Details” and “In Color,” not a single song on is pushes past the five-minute mark, a first for a My Morning Jacket album.

Form follows function on the punchiest MMJ record yet — there’s MPC-mashing electro-pop (“Lemme Know”), Danger Mouse metal (“Squid Ink”), AM radio gold (“Everyday Magic”), and an obvious stab at their own “D’yer Maker” (“I Can Hear Your Love”). At times it sounds effortless; Most of the time, it sounds too easy. Either way, it’s an album of modest, met ambitions and consummate professionalism, with nothing either as naggingly catchy as “Love Love Love” or aspiring to knock “Mahgeetah” or “Wordless Chorus” out of the closing spot on upcoming setlists. Which is probably still enough for it to be their fourth consecutive album to get the “best since Z!” treatment from critics anyway.

8. Circuital (2011)

If I’m to claim that Evil Urges was a failure of quality control rather than artistic inspiration, it stands to reason that Circuital is every bit the “return to form” it promised. The fake horn fanfare on “Victory Dance,” the kiddie choir of “Holdin’ On To Black Metal,” and the entire lyrical premise of “Outta My System” showed that Jim James hadn’t abandoned his goofier ideas, just used them in service of better songs. The title track showed they hadn’t abandoned the jam-band demographic either, while “The Day Is Coming” codified “spooky electro-arena rock” as a mandatory inclusion on My Morning Jacket albums (see also: “It Beats 4 U,” “Touch Me I’m Gonna Scream Pt. I”).

So why isn’t Circuital higher? Maybe it’s the polite polish lent by Tucker Martine, whose recent production charges included the NPR-friendly folk-rock of Neko Case and The Decemberists. Or, maybe it’s that I gave up on My Morning Jacket proselytizing when they touted Circuital as a “return to form,” something that cut against the fearless, forward-thinking approach that got them here. Circuital is still a very good album, one that’s better than I typically remember, but one that set “very good” as the standard which has been the enemy of true My Morning Jacket greatness since.

7. The Waterfall II (2020)

There’s an old saying in football that the backup quarterback is the most popular guy in town. And to a certain extent, that’s true of long-rumored and unreleased works like Songs From The Black Hole, Electric Nebraska, Cigarettes, and Valentines, and at least a dozen Prince and Neil Young albums. This also applies to the “long lost twin” of planned double albums, such as Machina/Machines Of God II and The Waterfall II, collections that were once promised as quickie follow-ups, only to be shelved, eventually released without fanfare, and taken up as the superior work when their predecessor failed to meet expectations.

I don’t really think The Waterfall left much to be desired, and it certainly wouldn’t have benefited from being a double album; like most My Morning Jacket albums post-Evil Urges, it was a bit too self-conscious to reach the heights of their earliest work. But I also wonder if My Morning Jacket denied The Waterfall II the same opportunity by not calling it anything else and allowing it to exist on its own terms. Jim James was a literally and figurative broken man during The Waterfall‘s writing process, and while most of part one spoke to his relationship woes, there’s a more pervasive admission of defeat throughout the moodier sequel (just witness the opening line on “Spinning My Wheels” — “I’ve been wrong for so long/risking my life for the sake of the song”).

I initially viewed its July 2020 release date as a shrug, permission to treat it like so many other peak-pandemic data dumps happening at the time, yet The Waterfall II had an unwitting prescience to it; Jim James was as sick of being trapped in his own body in 2013 as everyone else was seven years later.

6. Evil Urges (2008)

If we were to survey 1,000 My Morning Jacket fans for their individual albums ranking lists, I guarantee Evil Urges would have the most variance. Upon its release, Evil Urges was viewed as the logical extension of Z, or a restless artist’s reaction to Z‘s consensus praise, their weirdest album, or due to the presence of Joe Chicacarelli (who slicked up The White Stripes and The Shins one year prior), their most blatant crossover attempt, a bold severance of My Morning Jacket’s jam-band umbilical cord, or a complete misreading of their strengths.

Over the past 17 years, I’ve held all of these opinions. But Evil Urges is the most divisive My Morning Jacket album because it’s the most divided; the “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream” duo and “Smokin’ From Shootin'” expand My Morning Jacket’s range into bionic arena rock, dark disco, and platinum-plated country ballads, all of which still stand as career peaks. And then there’s the “Prince doing Ween doing Prince” funk-pop oddity “Highly Suspicious,” which — let’s just be clear here — is actually kinda underrated at this point. Or, at least, underappreciated, since it’s no more goofy than “Into The Woods” or “Off The Record” or “your ass, it draws me in like a Bermuda highway.”

This is also why I won’t totally knock “Librarian,” a song which cannot be accused of being forgettable, even if it’s my immediate pick for the worst song to ever appear on a My Morning Jacket studio album (until 2021). If anything, Evil Urges is sunk by the songs that hew closest to “classic My Morning Jacket,” specifically riff-rockin’ deep cuts like “Remnants” and “Aluminum Park” that I have no recollection of whatsoever.

I don’t know if Evil Urges can be called a “career killer” or even a “career ruiner” in a literal sense: These guys will play Red Rocks and Bonnaroo until Jim James hangs up his Flying V. But you weren’t hearing “American Radiohead!” anymore after this one.

5. The Tennessee Fire (1999)

From the beginning, there was always something misleading about The Tennessee Fire. I only lived in Kentucky for a year, but I never got the sense that any of its residents would want to be confused for Volunteers. And yet, My Morning Jacket’s debut album had that title, despite being so famously steeped in bluegrass lore; Most notably, Jim James recording his vocals in a silo located on a farm owned by guitarist Johnny Quaid’s grandparents, in a tiny Kentucky city that was once home to the real Colonel Sanders.

26 years later, it’s still misleading, but more because anyone working backwards through My Morning Jacket’s catalog will still be shocked at how much “early MMJ” sounded like a lo-fi solo project, one that hewed far closer to Will Oldham than, say, Lynyrd Skynyrd. There’s just enough of the latter for The Tennessee Fire to sound like a logical step towards At Dawn (specifically, the opening “Heartbreakin’ Man”), but the core is comprised of bleak, bleary weepers like “I Will Be There When You Die,” “They Ran” and “I Think I’m Going To Hell.” The Tennessee Fire will always be “the one before At Dawn,” but don’t be misled by that either; it’s still a fascinating and irreplicable document of My Morning Jacket taking sixteen guesses at who they wanted to be.

4. The Waterfall (2015)

While they’re best known as a band that has made at least four songs with the word “wonderful” in the title and curated a festival in Mexico called “One Big Holiday,” there’s always been an undercurrent of darkness in My Morning Jacket, if you knew where to look. The silo reverb on The Tennessee Fire left a bitter aftertaste on James’ loner soliloquies, At Dawn was dotted by images of violence, even It Still Moves had flickers of heat lightning and thunder in its overcast ambience.

But you had to read Jim James’ interviews to get a sense of the actual mental, physical, and spiritual toll that comes from 15 years of non-stop recording and touring. That is, until The Waterfall — “I’m getting so tired of trying to always be nice,” James spits on lead single “Big Decisions,” a lyric that would’ve been without precedent in the My Morning Jacket catalog where it not preceded minutes earlier by the poisonous acoustic ditty “Get The Point” (“So I’m tryin’ to tell you plainly how I’m feelin’ day to day / And I’m so sorry now that you ain’t feelin’ the same way,” though “sorry” should be in air quotes).

The Waterfall isn’t completely defined by James’ romantic disillusion, as the opening, klieg-lit duo of “Believe (Nobody Knows)” and “Compound Fracture” are My Morning Jacket at their most Coachella (not Bonnaroo)-core. But it’s nonetheless a distinction that gives The Waterfall (and its sequel) an edge over the competition in the “best since Evil Urges, but not Z” sweepstakes.

3. At Dawn (2001)

Best day-drinking album ever? I’ll admit to being extremely biased on this front, since I discovered At Dawn dropped during a semester where I needed only one class to graduate from a large Southern university, thus spending most of my daylight hours on the porch listening to the Allman Brothers and Sigur Ros in equal measure and contemplating the big, scary world out there with no real urgency on the matter. In other words, the target demographic for My Morning Jacket’s merger of genres that share a laid back approach to life, but for extremely different reasons. Or, more succinctly, “Southern rock, but what if… a constant four-beer buzz?”

My Morning Jacket would’ve found an audience with or without the reverb, but the uncanny production broadened, rather than contracted, the reach of At Dawn, drawing in cred-conscience listeners who might have scoffed at dry runs of “Lowdown” and “Just Because I Do” (that said, I’ll never not fast-forward through the interminable blooze workout “Honest Man”). Whether it’s the eerie minimalism of “If It Smashes Dawn” or the curtain-raising grandeur of the title track, At Dawn is cloaked in a dreamlike haze — specifically, the lighters-up coda of “The Way That He Sings” was the “where have you been all my life?” moment, the one of many on an album steeped in a Southern rock lineage without making it an explicit part of the music (as it did with Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera, another “where has this been all my life?” album from 2001). James was probably singing about the indescribable magic of music in general, but on At Dawn, many rightfully took it as him singing about himself.

2. Z (2005)

Steve’s consumed more My Morning Jacket live bootlegs than I could hope to in five lifetimes, so I’m not in a good position to argue with his belief that all My Morning Jacket songs sound better live. The preponderance of evidence even from my experience is on his side — I thought I merely loved My Morning Jacket before I saw them preview about a third of Z in a hotboxed 40 Watt during the summer of 2005. After that show, I was convinced they were the greatest American rock band of the 21st century. When I hear the newer stuff in the context of the classics, I actually like them more, not less, as they’re now part of a fascinating, unpredictable artistic trajectory rather than a 45-minute album I’m inevitably going to compare to Z.

Because… come on, have you ever heard Z in headphones? Before 2005, most people felt like a five-star My Morning Jacket album would just be one where they sounded like they did live. No one was asking for them to cut the reverb (or their hair for that matter) and turn out a 10-song, 45-minute, all-killer, no-filler album, but when they gave it a shot, it wasn’t just a matter of getting better equipment or shortening the song lengths (though they did that).

Z was borne of crucial lineup changes and the unexpected pairing with John Leckie, a producer best known for The Bends and A Storm In Heaven, whose studio credits trace back to George Harrison, Pink Floyd, T. Rex, and XTC. In short, a guy who knows how to make head trip music — witness the tremolo guitars rushing into the chorus of “It Beats 4 U” or “Off The Record” hopping into a lunar rover for its second half. But Leckie and My Morning Jacket knew when to lay off the effects pedals, whether it’s the perpetually underappreciated ballad “Knot Comes Loose” or James letting out a Frank Black-like howl on “Dondante,” a sound which is all the more stunning for having never appeared in any My Morning Jacket song before or since. And yeah, I suppose that the past two decades have proven Steve right about how “Gideon” and “Wordless Chorus” have always been meant for amphitheaters, but at least for me, nothing will top popping in that (weirdly notorious) CD copy of Z and hearing a band that sounded boundless.

1. It Still Moves (2003)

Like most people, I first heard Z as a brilliant leap forward for My Morning Jacket. But now that 20 years have passed, weren’t most of the things said about Z already true of It Still Moves? Did My Morning Jacket not reinvent classic Southern rock for the 21st century on “Steam Engine” or “I Will Sing You Songs,” the defining articles of “country-gaze” before anyone knew what to call it? Could you hear “Mahgeetah” and “One Big Holiday” and still remain unconvinced that My Morning Jacket could write anthems, just because there’s reverb and also extended guitar solos? Are “Golden” and “Just One Thing” any less transportive than the above because they’re only four minutes instead of eight? When I look back on Z, I hear My Morning Jacket brilliantly hopping from genre to genre, but on It Still Moves, alt-country, folk, shoegaze, orchestral soul, metal, and basically everything from the American songbook coalesces into a single, sui generis whole.

If we’re to reduce artistic achievement to a set of quantifiable metrics, this spot should absolutely go to Z. It’s My Morning Jacket’s most critically acclaimed and popular album, the one where they “transcended their humble Southern rock roots” or whatever and snatched the “American Radiohead” crown away from Wilco. Whenever My Morning Jacket promise a “return to form” — and that’s pretty much all they’ve done since Evil Urges — the ensuing album is always modeled after Z.

And that’s exactly why I can’t put it at the top. My Morning Jacket seem to believe that, if they really, really focus, it’s possible to make another Z. Meanwhile, the uncanny magic of It Still Moves is untouchable by them or anyone else.