Drive-By Truckers have announced details of their new album, American Band.
It will be released by ATO Records on September 30.
It arrives during a busy year for the band, who are celebrating their 20th anniversary and heading out on the Darkened Flags 2016 Tour across America, beginning in August.
The album was recorded at Nashville’s Sound Emporium with longtime producer/engineer David Barbe. Ahead of the album’s release, the band have previewed a new song “Surrender Under Protest” on NPR – you can hear it by clicking here.
“We are beyond thrilled to announce the release date of our new album American Band,” says Patterson Hood.
“We are launching the Preorder and our friends at NPR are posting a first taste so you can get a little sample of what we’ve been up to.
“‘Surrender Under Protest‘ is a Mike Cooley composition that is unlike any DBT song we’ve ever recorded, yet somehow sounds unmistakably like us. In a way, that’s pretty indicative of the album as a whole.
“These are crazy times and we have made a record steeped in this moment of history that we’re all trying to live through. We’ve always considered ourselves a political band, even when that aspect seemed to be concealed by some type of narrative device i.e. Dealing with issues of race by telling a story set in the time of George Wallace or class struggles by setting “Putting People On The Moon” in the age of Reagan.
This time out, there are no such diversions as these songs are mostly set front and center in the current political arena with songs dealing with our racial and cultural divisions, gun violence, mass shootings and political assholery. Once again, there is a nearly even split between the songs of Cooley and myself, with both of us bringing in songs that seem to almost imply a conversation between us about our current place in time.
“American Band is a sort of rock and roll call to arms as well as a musical reset button for our band and the country we live in. Most of all, we look at it as the beginnings of some conversations that we, as a people very much need to begin having if we ever hope to break through the divisions that are threatening to tear us apart.
“Drive-By Truckers are celebrating our twentieth anniversary as a band in an election year where some people are trying to define what it is to be American. Definitions based on some outdated ideology of prejudice and fear. We are loudly proclaiming that those people don’t speak for us. America is and always has been a land of immigrants and ideals. Ideals that we have often fallen short of achieving, but it’s the striving that has given us whatever claims to greatness we have had. That’s what America means to us and ‘We’re an American Band.'”
The tracklisting for American Band is:
Ramon Casiano
Darkened Flags on the Cusp of Dawn
Surrender Under Protest
Guns of Umpqua
Filthy and Fried
When the Sun Don’t Shine
Kinky Hypocrites
Ever South
What It Means
Once They Banned Imagine
Baggage
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