Today, Annie & The Caldwells —  a family group from West Point, Mississippi whose striking disco soul sound will stir church congregations and dance club revelers alike — announce Can’t Lose My (Soul), their debut project forty years in the making due out March 21 via Luaka Bop (Floating Points / Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, William Onyeabor). Pre-order / Pre-save Can’t Lose My (Soul) here.

The songs on Can’t Lose My (Soul), while propelled by vibrant, body-moving music, deal with heavy themes of spirituality, struggle, and redemption, all informed by their real troubles and experiences as an intergenerational family run by women. In these passionate performances, their personal stories transcend to a state of universal parable and salvation-driven ecstasy, resulting in the kind of communal uplift any preacher or DJ could envy.

Lead single “Wrong” encapsulates their potency, replete with soaring disco diva vocal runs, rhythmic snap, and repentance for doubting the unyielding love of higher powers and romantic partners alike.

Watch the video for “Wrong,” an irrepressible family affair shot on Main Street in their hometown of West Point, MS, here.

The Caldwells are headed by their mother Annie, a member of the Staples Jr. Singers and owner and proprietor of Caldwell’s Fashions, a beloved staple for women’s clothing and church outfits since the ’80s.

Annie & The Caldwells was founded when Annie and Joe — her guitar-player husband of fifty years — went to watch their eldest daughter perform a school talent show. To The Caldwells dismay, their daughter was singing the blues — secular music that did not speak the gospel. “We thought, if we don’t do something, the devil’s going to get her,” Annie said.

So Annie and Joe started their own group to keep their kids on the straight and narrow, incorporating music their kids loved — The Gap Band, Chaka Kahn, Bootsy Collins — into a fresh sound that infuses gospel with grit and street savvy. Two decades later, the constellation of family members in The Caldwells is more or less the same: Annie is backed by their daughters Deborah Caldwell Moore and Anjessica Caldwell and goddaughter Toni Rivers; Joe on guitar, their eldest son Willie Jr. on bass and youngest son Abel Aquirius on drums.

They generally play on weekends, so for their day jobs Willie Jr. drives a forklift, Abel Aquirius drives hospital patients, Anjessica works in customer care for an insurance company, Toni is an elementary school teacher, and Deborah does hair.

However, late in 2024, Annie & The Caldwells turned heads with a lightning bolt of a performance at Le Guess Who? festival in The Netherlands, one of their first performances outside the southern United States. MOJO deemed them “the most exciting, most dynamic family of faith imaginable,” elaborating that “their rhythm section (dad and two sons) would give the Family Stone a run for its money; the front line (mum and daughters) have unquenchable sass and spirituality.”

In their annual 2025 music preview, The Guardian’s head rock and pop critic, Alexis Petridis, wrote: “It is a fantastic album – funky, gritty and powerful, packed with incredible singing and potent songs that cast a stark eye over life’s hardships.” Furthermore, Petridis described their Le Le Guess Who? performance as “extraordinary: a mother and her three middle-aged daughters, clad in matching multicoloured harlequin-print dresses, belting out raw, disco-tinged soul gospel in the midst of a delirious stage invasion by ecstatic, dancing punters.”

Can’t Lose My (Soul) was produced by Ahmed Gallab, known as the artist Sinkane; the cover art was contributed by Raven Jackson from her Mississippi-based film All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt; and the liner notes were written by Danielle Amir Jackson, formerly of Oxford American.

Ahead of the release of Can’t Lose My (Soul), Annie & The Caldwells will embark on a winter European tour, including a performance at Church of Sound in London on February 14 (see full dates below), with more live dates in the works for later in 2025.