Counting Crows, “Butter Miracle: The Complete Sweets.”

Butter Miracle: The Complete Sweets has been a long time coming. Counting Crows released EP Butter Miracle: Suite One in 2021. Originally, the plan was to make another EP, Suite Two, the following year. However, after singing on Gang of Youths’ Angel in Realtime (2022), Crows’ frontman Adam Duritz decided the Suite Two material wasn’t strong enough. He updated some songs and added another.

This new material, combined with the EP, comprises the band’s first full-length album of original material since Somewhere Under Wonderland in 2014. It finds the band confident, comfortable and still writing some of the best songs of its career.

Counting Crows are a remarkably versatile and consistent band. They can play rock, pop or folk, and yet they always sound like themselves. There’s an ease they have in their playing that only comes from long hours in the studio and on the road together. While the band has three guitar players, they somehow never step all over each other. At various times, either Dan Vickrey and David “Immy” Immerglück might play lead, with David Bryson holding steady on the rhythm guitar. The guitars are always layered artfully, subtly panned between channels.

Duritz has gained a reputation as a tortured poet, often singing about the complications of fame after Counting Crows’ first album, August and Everything After (1993), became such a huge hit. On Butter Miracle, he seems to have come to a kind of peace with rock stardom, and maybe even to have embraced it in all its ridiculousness. “Spaceman in Tulsa” can be interpreted as a love letter to his fellow artists who undergo a metamorphosis on stage, as he does. Duritz sings of various characters with tough childhoods whose lives are transformed and brightened by getting on the bus and going out to perform. “I’m a pain killer/ And I’m a caterpillar/ I’m a motherfucking rock and roll star,” Duritz sings.

“Under the Aurora,” another of the standouts, finds Duritz singing, “If I could make it through the night and just see the aurora/ Maybe I could believe in something,” echoing his lyric from the Crows’ big hit “Mr. Jones,” “Believe in me/ ‘Cause I don’t believe in anything.” Fans who like the band’s poppier songs like “Accidentally in Love” will likely enjoy “Under the Aurora” and “Spaceman in Tulsa.” Fans of “A Long December” will probably dig the similarly somber, piano-based “Virginia Through the Rain.” Duritz’s lyrics are poetic as ever. “I carry distance like a burden/ My encumbrance and my strain/ 40 years across the sands/ Of your devotion and my shame,” he sings.

Sometimes, on Butter Miracle, Duritz filters his experiences though the story of a fictional band called Bobby and the Rat-Kings. “Elevator Boots,” a rollicking ’60s-sounding rock song, celebrates the freeing, medicinal power of playing live music: “Plug into the buzz and shake it ’til it turns around/ And you can’t stop feeling/ The Paul Smith suits and the elevator boots astound/ And you can’t help healing.” The catchy chorus and the joyous harmonies make “Elevator Boots” one of the highlights of this album.

Songs “Tall Grass,” “Elevator Boots,” “The Angel of 14th Street” and “Bobby and the Rat-Kings” at the end of the album are the holdovers from the Suite One EP. These songs have been kicking around since 2021 and were already strong. However, the mixes of these songs sound even better than they did on the EP.

Duritz has one of the most recognizable voices in rock, and Counting Crows have long been one of the most underrated bands from the ’90s. The fact that they are still trucking along in 2025 is impressive on its own, and no one would blame them if they wanted to rest on their laurels. But Butter Miracle: The Complete Sweets was clearly a labor of love for them, and one that paid off.

Follow Rachel Alm on Twitter at @thouzenfold, on Instagram at @thousandfold, and on Bluesky at @thousandfold.bsky.social.