If there’s one thing that the modern music economy has made obsolete, it’s the concept of “selling out.” Back in alternative rock’s 90s heyday, the biggest sin an artist could commit was signing to a major label, adopting a more commercial sound, and/or literally putting your music in commercials. The parameters of what defined “selling out” weren’t always clear or consistent – no one seems to put up a stink that Nirvana’s Nevermind was released on the imprint of a major entertainment conglomerate instead of Sub Pop – but the concept remained a powerful one for decades, and was only truly felled in the late 2000s, when bands could no longer attract a reliable audience via radio or MTV and had to settle for syncing their songs in Chevy ads instead. 

But just because signing to a major label doesn’t destroy your credibility like it once did doesn’t mean that it doesn’t come with its own pitfalls, pitfalls that are exemplified by Stampede: Vol. 1, the latest EP from masked South African/Canadian singer-songwriter Orville Peck. Stampede: Vol. 1, which was released by Warner Music Group, isn’t Peck’s first record for a major – he had previously released an EP, Show Pony, and an album, Bronco, on Columbia in 2020 and 2022, respectively. But its mix of celebrity duets and middling covers feels very “major label” in the way it tries to position Peck for greater fame, and the way it flattens the characteristics that made him such an exciting voice for the benefit of a wider, less engaged audience. The end result finds Peck at a crossroads, with the prospect of creating genuinely interesting music on one end and becoming a mere gimmick on the other. 

Granted, gimmickry has always been a part of Peck’s brand, albeit one that, in the past, was overshadowed (or at least balanced) by the quality of the music itself. While not yet confirmed by the singer, fans and journalists have deduced that Orville Peck’s true identity is most likely that of a Johannesburg-born, Vancouver-raised musician who got his start as the drummer for a Canadian punk band. The Orville Peck persona only emerged in 2019 with the release of his solo full-length debut Pony on Sub Pop, the legendary Seattle-based indie label that launched the likes Nirvana, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and Sleater-Kinney. 

Of course, part of what made Pony stand out was that it sounded nothing like the grunge legends Sub Pop made their name off of, and nothing like the majority of indie rock that was being released in the late 2010s. Instead of indulging in 90s nostalgia or making hushed, strummy ballads, Peck burst out of the gate with a fascinating mix of 80s goth rock and classic country, singing in a dulcet baritone about rodeos and cattle drives while his backing band churned through Bauhaus and Cure inspired instrumentals. Peck also didn’t look like anyone in indie rock, either. Instead of embracing the jeans and T-shirt ordinariness of most of his contemporaries, he constructed a series of homemade fringe masks that, when paired with a cowboy hat, made him look like a gothic Lone Ranger. Completing the act was his insistence on keeping his true identity a secret, which only increased the level of mystique surrounding the project and earned him a solid following in his own right.

Is it fair to call all of this – the hats, the masks, the Elvis-if-he-listened-to-Joy-Division voice – a schtick? Sure, but it was an incredibly refreshing schtick in an era where social media had almost completely erased all sense of mystery from rock and pop stardom, and in a rock scene where theatrically had been abandoned for ennui and understatement. It also helped that, for the most part, the music backed up the hype. Even if Peck’s presentation made you roll your eyes, there was no denying the sense of danger, drama, and occasional camp he managed to imbue his songs with. In “Big Sky,” his voice creeps along the highway with a sense of looming lust and danger; in “Dead of Night,” it soars across the starlit sky like Chris Isaak’s; in “Kansas (Remembers Me Now)” it elegantly drones like a singer on a warped 45 before fading into a fog of Lynchian static. Yes, the man had a defined aesthetic, but he managed to find variations within that aesthetic, and the result was an album that both felt singular and never got boring, thanks to a well-spring of ideas and full on commitment to the bit.

But after being nominated for a Juno Award (basically a Canadian Grammy) and being named for the longlist for the Polaris Prize (basically a Canadian Grammy if there were only one of them and the winner won $50,000), Peck signed with major label Columbia, and the bit slowly began to change. As the name Show Pony implies, his first release for the house that built Beyoncé, Adele, and Maren Morris marked a slow pivot towards the mainstream during which the singer sanded down some of his more gothic edges in the service of creating a more approachable sound. Sometimes that resulted in “Summertime,” a longing country rock song that hit hard in the COVID-plagued April of the single’s release, and sometimes it resulted in “Drive Me, Crazy,” a kind of tongue-in-cheek piano rock track about truckers falling in love that offers few new ideas musically, gets pretty silly lyrically, and is at least ninety-seconds too long.

But the two most important tracks on Show Pony are “Fancy,” Peck’s cover of Bobbie Gentry’s country-soul classic, and “Legends Never Die,” his duet with fellow Canadian Shania Twain. Covers and duets (and covers sung as duets) would soon become a hallmark for Peck – between 2020 and 2023, Peck released at least seven non-album singles that fell into either or both of those two categories (eight, if you count his remix of k.d. lang’s “Miss Chatelaine”). None of these covers and/or duets are bad, per se, but they essentially spammed the same two ideas over and over – singing something that was a natural fit for Peck’s voice/style (such as his covers of the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” and “You Lost That Loving Feelin’,” which he recorded with Paul Cauthen as “The Unrighteous Brothers”), or rearranging dance pop classics as country songs (such as Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy” and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”). In both cases, the novelty eventually wore off.

Bronco, Peck’s 2022 full-length debut with Columbia, didn’t feature any covers or duets, but it did put forward the slickest, most pop friendly version of the singer yet, turning its back almost completely on Pony’s darker elements in favor of straightforward country rock. It’s a stylistic shift that Peck was certainly game for, slipping comfortably into the Springsteenian romanticism of “Daytona Sand” and cocky swagger of “Outta Time,” but as an indie rock fan, I couldn’t help but also recognize that it sounded like the kind of major label release that all of the Gen Xers who fretted about selling out would have hated. 

The thing is, I could handle the move away from songs about slinking around roadside bars to songs about hurtling down the Pacific Coast Highway. What sat less well with me was the way the Orville Peck character went from something strange and mysterious into something much more guileless. The Peck of Pony was tongue in cheek, but he was also subversive, singing about queer themes in a stereotypically masculine style. That subversion is almost entirely gone on Bronco – instead, Peck becomes much kitschier, eking out a funny line here and there (“She tells me she don’t like Elvis”/”I say I want a little less conversation, please ”) but also serving up catchphrases that feel like they were meant to meet some kind of country catchphrase quota (“Yippee-ki-yi-yay, I’m always down”). Pony was, at times, so ironic that it became intentionally earnest, while Bronco was so earnest that it became accidentally ironic.

The worst of these post-Pony tendencies reaches its peak on Stampede: Vol 1., his debut EP for Warner Music Group, which is 43% covers, 100% duets, and frequently overproduced and overperformed. But worst of all, it feels like the kind of thing a much older and much more over-the-hill artist than Peck would record as a last stab at mainstream relevance, a hastily assembled collection of tracks featuring living legends (Willie Nelson, Elton John), modern stars (Midland, Allison Russell, Nathaniel Rateliff), and SEO-juicing Zoomers (Noah Cyrus, Bu Cuaron) that’s more concerned with generating buzz than creating interesting music. 

Granted, Peck does dabble into some hitherto explored genres for him – Latin pop on “Miénteme” (with Cuaron), jazz on “Chemical Sunset” (with Russell) – but the arrangements for either song feel like GarageBand presets of their respective styles, and Peck’s voice, forced into its upper register, is an awkward fit. He’s a more natural match for country ballads “How Far Will We Take It?” (with Cyrus) and “The Hurtin’ Kind” (with Midland), but neither sound like anything you can’t already hear on mainstream radio. Peck and Nelson’s take on Ned Sublette’s “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other,” is perfectly competent, if unremarkable and unsubtle (which is of course the point), but he and John’s duet on “Saturday Night’s All Right (For Fighting)” might be the worst recording of Peck’s career. I like both artists, but I can’t think of any good reason why they needed to record such a straightforward take on an already overplayed song, or why the production sounds so chintzy, or why their voices layer so awkwardly upon each other during the choruses. I’d be shocked to hear that anyone involved spent more than two hours working on it.

The best song on Stampede: Vol. 1 is also the one that offers the clearest path forward for Peck. Opening with a “Be My Baby”-style drumbeat and closing with a Clarence Clemons-esque saxophone solo, “Conquer the Heart” is a fairly adept Bruce Springsteen rip off, anthemic chorus and all. It’s a direction that Peck would be wise to lean into; after all, Springsteen is essentially playing a fictionalized version of himself whenever he gets on stage or records an album, too. The difference between the two of them is that Springsteen has always had a clear sense of that character. Orville Peck, by contrast, seems to be struggling with what or who exactly he is – he’s becoming a gimmick divorced from context, a character without a script. That may be a sign that the project has run its course, and that it’s time for the man behind the mask to come up with something new. Or maybe it’s a sign that he needs to retreat back to the indie space and seize on country’s newfound relevance in that genre. Either way, I hope he figures it out.