MIKE McCLURE & CHRISLYN LAWRENCE UNELASH “BELLY OF THE BEAST”

CROW AND GAZELLE SHARE SINGLE “BELLY OF THE BEAST” FROM LP

ALBUM RELEASE SHOWS BEGIN MAY 17

LISTEN: “BELLY OF THE BEAST”

Today, Texas-based duo Crow and Gazelle share their new single “Belly of the Beast,” the latest offering from their forthcoming album Truth Be Told, out this June. The band has also announced a run of shows throughout Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas to celebrate the album’s release. A full list of dates is below.

Truth Be Told is a sweeping, spiritually charged concept record that explores love, power, survival, and the truths buried beneath generations of fear, told through the voices of a woman and a man navigating a collapsing world.

Where lead single “Fall How It Will” introduced the album’s emotional and philosophical foundation, “Belly of the Beast” marks a turning point, where reflection gives way to confrontation. With doubled vocals and a driving, almost incantatory rhythm, the song unfolds like a spell, calling into question the systems we’ve been taught to accept as inevitable.

At its core, “Belly of the Beast” wrestles with the entangled forces of patriarchal religion, capitalism, and colonization, reframing them not as divine or natural orders, but as constructs built to dominate and divide. Through the lens of the album’s central heroine, a woman aligned with nature, memory, and resistance, the song imagines a path toward dismantling those systems from within.

“It’s a deeply spiritual war we’re under,” the band explains. “With violence, exploitation, and environmental destruction becoming normalized, we’re being asked to forget who we are and where we come from. This song is about remembering and about believing that love, not domination, is the force that will ultimately undo what’s been built.”

LISTEN: “FALL HOW IT WILL”

Crow and Gazelle is the collaboration between Oklahoma Red Dirt pioneer Mike McClure and multidisciplinary artist Chrislyn Lawrence, whose creative partnership sits at the heart of Truth Be Told. McClure, a founding member of The Great Divide and an Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame inductee, is also a widely respected producer whose work has helped shape artists including Cross Canadian Ragweed, Turnpike Troubadours, and Kaitlin Butts. Lawrence brings an equally vital perspective as a poet, filmmaker, community organizer, and trauma-informed healer.

Together, they create work that confronts difficult questions about belief, belonging, grief, and the myths that govern our lives. Told as an intimate dialogue between two central characters, Truth Be Told unfolds against the backdrop of a rising rebellion, challenging shame-based theology, exposing systems built on fear, and imagining a world where tenderness and defiance coexist.

Again and again, the album returns to its core conviction: that liberation will not come through domination or violence, but through radical love.