We are now a few years deep into the age of the surprise album-release, but those releases usually look more like gleaming corporate machinery rumbling to life, and less like an artist wanting to give something to fans as quickly as possible. So credit Eric Church, the Nashville country fixture and maybe our greatest working rock star, with finding the goofiest, most throwbacky way possible to put his new surprise album out into the world. Church didn't announce Mr. Misunderstood, his new album, with a midnight Tweet or a banner suddenly showing up on iTunes. Instead, he mailed out physical copies of the album, actual compact discs, to members of the Church Choir, his fan club. Who even has fan clubs anymore? And how excited must those people have been to head out to their mailboxes, open up envelopes, and find this beautifully produced new LP from the guy? I remember being really excited to get a crappy T-shirt from the Sonic Youth fan club 20 years ago; if they'd sent me an early copy of Washing Machine before announcing that Washing Machine existed, I would've lost my shit. So that's a neat trick: An album rollout that's noisy and sudden, the way these things are supposed to be, but also personal and down-home and built around gratitude for the people who identify most closely with what you do. And the same could be said of the album itself. It's very much a product of Nashville's music-superstar ecosystem, but it's also warm and direct and considered. It doesn't announce itself in any grand ways, the way Church's 2014 album The Outsiders did, but it still kicks ass, albeit politely. I've had it on my phone for less than a week, and it's already become car-stereo singalong material.