Orville Peck’s queer subversion of country-music tropes—along with the camp of his ever-present fringed mask and the melodrama of his baritone croon—made him an icon of the genre’s progressive late-2010s resurgence. The Canadian cowpoke carved out his own niche in 2019 with haunting songs like “Queen of the Rodeo,” about a real-life drag queen named Thanks Jem, and “Dead of Night,” which uses twangy tremolo to express the loneliness of losing a partner in crime. One of 2020’s Apple Music Up Next artists, he earned the ultimate country-establishment co-sign in “Legends Never Die,” a feisty duet with Shania Twain, released that same year. And after deepening his sweeping sound on such turns as 2022’s “C’mon Baby, Cry,” he lined up a dream roster of collaborators for 2024’s Stampede, including artists as disparate as Willie Nelson and Kylie Minogue. “I never really acknowledged or paid much attention to the barriers that have come up for me as a gay country artist,” Peck told Apple Music that year. In fact, growing up in South Africa, he wasn’t even aware of any potential prejudice lurking within the genre: “Maybe that is part of the reason I just didn’t have any fear about it. Because in my mind, I really didn’t think it should be a problem.”