Katie Crutchfield, whose band Waxahatchee plays Jannus Live in St. Petersburg, Florida on May 3, 2024. Credit: Photo by Molly Matalon

It took forever, but the world is starting to realize how much country music influences indie-rock. Those worlds don’t sound much better together than they do in the hands of Katie Crutchfield, who’s just announced a new album and spring tour for her band, Waxahatchee, which is coming to Tampa Bay this summer.

Tickets to see Waxahatchee play Jannus Live in St. Petersburg on Friday, May 3 go on sale to the public on Friday, Jan. 12 and are listed at $27 & up. A LiveNation presale is happening right now (password: “SPOTLIGHT”), and a Daddy Kool Records presale starts Thursday, Jan. 11 at 1 p.m. (password: “KOOL”).

Good Morning, an Australian indie-rock band supporting a handful of 2023 singles, opens the St. Pete show, along with Waxahatchee’s only other Florida date (May 4 in Orlando). The Bay area has not seen Crutchfield play a show since the 2017 Et Cultura festival when she played the since-revamped and renamed State Theatre as part of one of the best festival lineups in the region’s history.

Waxahatchee’s new album, Tigers Blood, is due March 22, and is the follow up to the band’s acclaimed 2020 album, Saint Cloud, which was released at the height of the pandemic and became something of a warm blanket for a country forced to stay away from their community.

Tigers Blood finds the 35-year-old songwriter on a new label, Anti-, and working out of Texas’ famed Sonic Ranch studio alongside a host of new collaborators—including MJ Lenderman, Spencer Tweedy, plus Phil and Brad Cook—who all appear on the album’s lead single, “Right Back To It,” a song Crutchfield said she wrote backstage waiting for her slot opening for Jason Isbell and Sheryl Crow. Most of the songs on the record, she said in a press release, came as her writing hand heated up at the end of her 2022 tour.

“I’m really interested in writing love songs that are gritty and unromantic. I wanted to make a song about the ebb and flow of a longtime love story,” Crutchfield added about the single. “I thought it might feel untraditional but a little more in alignment with my experience to write about feeling insecure or foiled in some way internally, but always finding your way back to a newness or an intimacy with the same person.”

The video is a visually stunning trip on Caddo Lake, which is about 800 miles east of Sonic Ranch. Watch it below.