Drive-By Truckers - The New OK (LP) - Red Vinyl

Drive-By Truckers didn’t plan to make a second record in 2020, but The New OK arrived digitally on October 2, 2020 via ATO Records, then on LP and CD that December, and it felt like a timely dispatch from a band that refuses to look away. It plays like a companion to The Unraveling from earlier that year, only leaner and more urgent, the sound of a group reacting in real time to a chaotic season of protests, isolation, and political exhaustion.

The title track sets the tone right away. Patterson Hood, who was living in Portland during the 2020 protests, sings with a raw edge that sits between weary and defiant. The groove is tight and economical, the guitars pushing forward while Brad Morgan’s snare cracks like a live wire. It is not a thesis so much as a field report, and that fits this band. Drive-By Truckers have always worked best when they write the news in pencil, with sweat and static still on the page.

The album stitches together newly written songs from 2020 with material that grew out of sessions connected to The Unraveling, and the blend works. You can hear that urgency in Watching the Orange Clouds, a slow build that captures the unnerving beauty and dread of a city under gas. Then there is The Perilous Night, originally released a few years earlier as a standalone shot at America’s slide into cynicism, now slotted here where it belongs, a bridge between the pre-2020 drumbeat and the year when everything boiled over. Tough to Let Go brings a reflective pull, the kind of late-night DBT tune that sneaks up on you with a hook and sticks because it feels lived in.

Cooley’s voice and guitar give the record its cool stare. He is always the steady counterweight to Hood’s storm, a necessary bit of shade on a hot day, and his writing here adds texture without softening the edge. Jay Gonzalez colors the corners with organ and piano, bright one minute, ghostly the next, while Matt Patton’s bass keeps the whole thing rooted in muscle. The lineup has been together long enough to find that telepathic rock band thing, and you hear it in the small decisions, a held note here, a cymbal choke there. Nothing is fussy. Everything serves the song.

The choice to close with The KKK Took My Baby Away, the Ramones classic, is more than a novelty. It reframes the tune inside the Truckers’ world, swapping cartoon snap for a clenched-jaw stomp that lands like a crooked grin in hard times. Punk has always lived inside this band’s southern rock engine, and this cover makes that lineage plain. It also adds a necessary flash of gallows humor to a record that stares directly at American turmoil.

Context matters with this group. The New OK captures a specific moment, but it also ties back to the band’s long thread of telling hard stories with guitars. Going back to Decoration Day and Southern Rock Opera, they have insisted that history sits in the room with us, and in 2020 it was on the front lawn. You can hear why fans who found the band through American Band stuck around. These songs build on that run, political because life was political, musical because the band still cares deeply about tone and feel.

If you are the sort who flips through bins looking for Drive-By Truckers vinyl, The New OK sits nicely next to The Unraveling and American Band, a tight trilogy of present-tense rock records. The New OK vinyl landed in December 2020 and it is a good one to spin loud, the drums popping and the guitars snarling just right. I’ve seen copies tucked in the new arrivals at my local Melbourne record store, and friends in Perth swear it turns up often among new imports if you are hunting vinyl records Australia wide. If that fails, it is easy enough to buy Drive-By Truckers records online, and there is a certain pleasure in lining up Drive-By Truckers albums on vinyl and tracing the arc from ballads to barn burners in real time.

This is not a grand concept piece, and it does not need to be. It is a quick step into the fray from a band that knows how to write through the noise, and for my money it stands as one of the most immediate statements in their catalog. The moment has passed, the songs remain, and they still spark.