The fringed Lone Ranger mask which has obscured Orville Peck’s face since his 2019 debut album, Pony, finally came off in 2025 when he took on the role of the Emcee in the Broadway revival of Cabaret. On Appaloosa, the elusive 37-year-old singer gets back in the saddle for an EP that splits its time between the lonesome American West and an even more desolate American present. Shadows fall across a one-horse town on “Dreaded Sundown,” whose eerie drama carries echoes of Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down).” But the doldrums of “Drift Away” take place in the post-pandemic era (“Watch the kids riding shotgun roads/In ’21, all the movies closed”), and the Roy Orbison-flavored “It’s the End of the World” finds the romance in end times.