A woman loads her father’s .45 and empties her grief into the silence. A mother gives up her baby to save her. A saint steps out of a centuries-old painting and lays her hand on the head of a dying city. Ghost lights flicker out on a Carolina backroad. These aren’t metaphors. They’re coordinates. This is the world of Saints and Warriors, the newest record from Abigail Dowd—a story catcher, a mystic, a singer-songwriter-guitar-slinger who walks barefoot through spiritual fire and turns what she finds into songs.

This album isn’t a performance. It’s an invocation.

Dowd doesn’t just write songs. She channels them, pulling from ancestral dreams, saint lore, combat stories, half-lit memories, and the quiet hum of American ghosts. With a voice like smoke over river water and guitar work that could whisper or wound, Saints and Warriors doesn’t just speak, it listens.

The record opens with the Mul Mantra, Ek Ong Kar, and never lets go of that thread. Celestial but never floating, rooted in groove and carried by lyrics that land like half-remembered stories from another life. Produced and engineered by Jason Richmond (Avett Brothers, The War and Treaty), the sound is warm, deliberate, and spacious, like a room built for prayer and pain to co-exist.

Raised in the American South and shaped by travels that read like an anthropologist’s fever dream, Dowd builds songs from the cultural ruins we walk past every day: Scots graveyards, Native trails, Eastern mantras, family myths, war stories, saints and mothers and the long silence in between.

But don’t let the mysticism fool you. There’s fire here. There’s blood.

“We’re all saints and warriors walking our way home, together and alone,” Dowd says.

“But the whole point of this album is to move beyond that binary. It’s not about transcending the duality. It’s about just being a f*ing human.”

It’s a record of deep listening. Not the kind you throw on while you’re folding laundry. The kind you sit with, stare at, cry to, forgive someone to. The kind that cracks something open and leaves you softer, stranger, better.

You don’t return to Saints and Warriors because it changes. You return because you do.