Drive-By Truckers Announce New Album, Share Single & Add Tour Dates

Celebrating 20 years this year, veteran rockers Drive-By Truckers will release a new studio album entitled American Band via ATO Records on September 30. The band also premiered “Surrender Under Protest,” the first single from their upcoming 11th full length record.

DBT will join Yonder Mountain String Band and Preservation Hall Jazz Band on Saturday, August 20 at Red Rocks to begin the Darkened Flags 2016 Tour in support of American Band. The group fronted by Patterson Hood will follow that with several additional headlining shows, including two-night stands at Portland’s Wonder Ballroom, San Francisco’s The Fillmore and Los Angeles’ Teragram Ballroom planned for the fall. Additional dates are expected to be added soon.

Along with guitarist/vocalist Hood, the current Truckers lineup featuring guitarist Mike Cooley, multi-instrumentalist Jay Gonzalez, drummer Brad Morgan and bassist Matt Patton recorded American Band in late 2015 with longtime producer David Barbe at the famed Sound Emporium in Nashville. Featuring 11 new tracks, the first single “Surrender Under Protest” can be streamed below:

Here’s Hood’s statement regarding the new record and single:

We are beyond thrilled to announce the release date of our new album American Band. We are launching the pre-order 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 of 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 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.”

American Band – the eleventh studio album by Drive-By Truckers. Coming September 30th, 2016 from ATO Records.

And don’t miss the Darkened Flags 2016 Tour, beginning in August.

See you at The Rock Show,
Patterson Hood
Drive-By Truckers

American Band Tracklist

1. Ramon Casiano
2. Darkened Flags on the Cusp of Dawn
3. Surrender Under Protest
4. Guns of Umpqua
5. Filthy and Fried
6. When the Sun Don’t Shine
7. Kinky Hypocrites
8. Ever South
9. What It Means
10. Once They Banned Imagine
11. Baggage