On May 15, Texas-based duo Crow and Gazelle will unveil Truth Be Told, a sweeping, spiritually charged concept album about love, power, survival, and the truths buried beneath generations of fear. In it, the pair tell the story of a woman and a man navigating a collapsing world, reckoning with inherited harm, confronting patriarchal control, and searching for a more liberated way to live and love.

Crow and Gazelle is Oklahoma Red Dirt pioneer Mike McClure and multidisciplinary artist Chrislyn Lawrence; their musical and artistic partnership is central to the album’s force. McClure is a founding member of The Great Divide, an Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame inductee, and a widely respected producer whose work has helped shape artists including Cross Canadian Ragweed, Turnpike Troubadours, and Kaitlin Butts. Lawrence brings a different but equally vital language to the collaboration: poet, filmmaker, community organizer, trauma-informed healer, and storyteller. Together, they use their work to confront difficult questions about belief, belonging, grief, and the myths that govern our lives.

Told through the voice of a central feminine character and the partner who moves beside her, Truth Be Told unfolds like an intimate dialogue set against a rising rebellion. Across its songs, Crow and Gazelle challenge shame-based theology, confront the wounds left by misogyny and authoritarian religion, and expose the myths that sustain empires built on fear. At the heart of the record is a heroine hunted for speaking dangerous truths as she navigates a world bent on silencing women in order for its power structures to survive.

For Lawrence, those themes are deeply personal. “Traps of unworthiness made by religions that use sin, exclusivity, and shame to convert us, also weaken us because they divide us, and that makes us forget what’s really sacred,” she says. “We live in a world where violence shapes our beliefs, which shapes our politics. Our culture teaches us violence is a part of “God’s plan.” When you’re taught to believe that you and others are inherently evil, that women are less holy than men, and that love only counts if it looks a certain way, you will struggle to find any tender or honest places that might give you true safety, growing up. That creates so much alienation and fear. We were both raised in cultures of unworthiness, where people believe unless you accept the torture and death of someone else for your sins, as ordained, then you will burn in fire. Some embers of that shame and fear breed self hatred, and more violence. And addictions too, and cycles of abuse, as we all try to fill the void made by worshiping death. Mac and I love the teachings and messages of Jesus, but we prefer to honor his life, and the revolution of love that he led, not his death. That feels more powerful to us. And is probably what Jesus would prefer. The other myth is just not the version of a divine connection that I have come to know. The Creator I know is much bigger and bolder, buzzing and shimmering with love that feels truly alive. A singular separate fear based male God never made me feel very safe, or alive. That we are forgiven or worthy, only if a vengeful man says so? No, thank you. That belief left me empty, and almost killed me.”

Again and again, the album returns to its core conviction: that liberation will not come through domination or violence, but through radical love. Rather than offering easy answers, the duo builds a new world, one where tenderness and defiance coexist, where spiritual deconstruction becomes an act of resistance, and where the divine feminine rises back to the center of the story. “Remembering is the revolution,” Lawrence explains. “Recovering my divine worth meant deconstructing organized religion and undoing the lies that taught me to see myself as unworthy and separate from creation. Once truth was restored, I realized we are powerful beyond measure. We don’t need anyone else to save us, we just need to remember what is real.”

That vision comes into sharp focus on the album’s first single, “Fall How It Will,” a haunting meditation on religious trauma, and return. The song speaks to spiritual and emotional wounds created by organized religion and misogyny, specifically the creation myth of Adam and Eve, while reaching toward something gentler and more expansive. Framed as a moment of care between the record’s two central characters, “Fall How It Will” rejects the lie of original sin for a deeper truth: original love. With imagery of a boundless garden and the well of knowledge alive inside us all, the song is a call to recognize one’s own worthiness, to lay down somewhere easy and let the night “fall how it will,” and remember that there was never anything wrong with us to begin with.

The album’s second single, “Belly of the Beast,” pushes that reckoning into darker territory. Originally written by McClure and reframed by Lawrence to fit the album’s narrative arc, the song casts its heroine deep inside the machinery of empire, confronting the forces that profit from division, domination, and the suppression of women. Drawing on imagery from ancient myth, organized religion, and class struggle, the track reimagines the traditional hero’s tale as a battle between oppressive power structures and those who dare to resist them. In the world of Truth Be Told, the heroine survives not by becoming the hunter, but by breaking the spell that taught us to glorify the hunt in the first place.

Crow and Gazelle write songs built around poetry, sparse but reverent instrumentation, and entangled harmonies, creating a sound that feels intimate and apocalyptic all at once. Truth Be Told drifts through eerie sonic landscapes, devotional stillness, and flashes of righteous fire as it ushers listeners through grief, awakening, resistance, and return.

For Lawrence, the album ultimately points toward a larger reckoning. “We humans are here to care for the earth and each other -  to love, not conquer,” she says. “Deconstruction is essential for the revolution. This album is both a prayer and a battle cry, an invitation to dig deeper and expose the truth for ourselves.”

Truth Be Told is an album that refuses silence. It reckons with the stories we inherit and challenges societal structures that profit from fear. It beckons us to remember our interconnectivity and our worth, and reminds us that building a gentler world is possible. At its heart, the record insists on a radical proposition: love is not weakness, but a superpower, and it is essential for transformation.