Mari Rubio, the visionary producer and multi-instrumentalist known as more eaze, has announced her new album, sentence structure in the country, arriving March 20th, 2026 via Thrill Jockey. This announcement follows the massive success of no floor, her 2025 collaboration with claire rousay, which was hailed as one of the year’s most organic and free-flowing records and featured in KLOF Mag’s Top 100 Albums of 2025. This new solo effort stands as a definitive statement of Rubio’s skill, blending an inviting wit with incisive compositions that balance technical mastery and raw emotional honesty.
The album’s title reflects the musical vernacular that shaped Rubio’s life. Growing up playing fiddle in traditional folk and country scenes, she imbues these new arrangements with a deep reverence for the evolution of those forms. To bring this vision to life, Rubio gathered an elite group of collaborators: Wendy Eisenberg, Henry Earnest, Alice Gerlach, Jade Guterman, and Ryan Sawyer. Rubio notes that their unique chord voicings and performance styles helped redefine and clarify her own musical voice during the recording process.
Alongside the news, Rubio shared the vulnerable first single, “bad friend,” featuring Wendy Eisenberg. The track is a masterclass in unconventional arrangement, built around pedal steel melodies played in a non-traditional, rhythmic style. Lyrically, the song explores the discomfort of social friction and the feeling of being an “alien” within one’s own social circles. Rubio describes how the piece came together:
“Like a lot of the songs on this album, this has sat with me for years and taken many different shapes. I couldn’t really leave this one alone. It just kept coming back in my head. I hadn’t played it in years, and then when I played Chicago with Alan Sparhawke, I made a last minute decision to come back to this song as a sort of comfort, and that opened me up to reconsidering the arrangement and form. The key for unlocking it was the pedal steel: it’s kind of about playing it in a non-traditional way, strumming it more like a normal guitar rather than using traditional pedal steel moves but the main riff of the song is built largely about idiomatic idiosyncrasies/quirks with my pedal steel and electronics setup.
“To some extent this song lyrically is about knowing you shouldn’t have romantic feelings for a friend but it’s also about not doing a very good job hanging out with people and generally feeling like an alien. Sort of about having trouble in Texas dealing with my social circles, especially the last few years I was there.”
Sentence structure in the country is a textural marvel, shifting between lush, electronic-embellished flourishes and moments of spare, minimalist beauty. It is a mosaic of ethereal electronics and loamy acoustics, sculpted into a series of beautifully realized, self-contained worlds.
Source: klofmag.com