Salt River is the ninth studio album by American singer Sam Amidon. It was released on January 24, 2025, via River Lea Records. It is Amidon's first album release since his 2020 eponymous album, Sam Amidon.
Salt River was produced by American saxophonist Sam Gendel. It features the singles "I'm On My Journey Home", "Friends and Neighbors", and "Golden Willow Tree", which were released on October 24, 2024, December 12, 2024, and January 21, 2025, respectively. Amidon described it as "a campfire, but the campfire is around Sam Gendel's synthesizer".
The Observer rated the album three stars out of five, stating "As a domestic get-together, the albumâÂÂs enjoyable enough, but actual magic is in short supply," while music website AllMusic described it as "trippy, bucolic, sophisticated, and simple, like a dream about a folksong." The Skinny added that "Salt River blurs the boundary between tradition and modernity," giving it four stars out of five. Pitchfork gave the album a rating of 7.3 out of 10 and wrote that "overall, this is another fine example of AmidonâÂÂs capacious, bracingly simple definition of the genre yoked to him." London-based magazine MusicOMH described Salt River as "another successful example of Amidon drawing on his folk upbringing and creating something very much on his own terms," and gave it a rating of 3.5 out of 5. Will Russell of the Dublin-based magazine, Hot Press, gave a rating of eight out of ten to the album and remarked "vintage effort from US folk merchant."
Credits adapted from the album's liner notes.