Drive-By Truckers - The Unraveling (LP)

Drive-By Truckers spent two decades chronicling the American story with guitars, grit, and a reporter’s eye, and The Unraveling might be their most bracing dispatch yet. Released on January 31, 2020 through ATO Records, it arrives like a weather report from the edge. You can hear the urgency in the first single, Armageddon’s Back in Town, where Patterson Hood sings like he is scanning headlines in real time while Brad Morgan’s drums kick the band forward. It is a lean record, no filler, and the writing cuts close to the bone.

The sessions took place at Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis, a room with history seeped into the floors. Longtime producer and confidant David Barbe is back at the helm, and the sound feels lived-in. You get the natural room across the kit, Jay Gonzalez’s organ sits like a lantern glow in the mix, and Matt Patton’s bass keeps everything grounded while the guitars scrape and shine. This is not a polished protest album. It breathes. It smolders. On a good stereo, especially on The Unraveling vinyl pressing, the space around the band becomes part of the storytelling.

The songs are as direct as the titles suggest. Thoughts and Prayers calls out the empty ritual after mass shootings with a melody that burrows in and a chorus that refuses to let the subject skate by. Babies in Cages needs no unpacking. Hood’s vocal walks a line between sorrow and fury, and the band follows him with a slow, heavy patience that stings more than a shout ever could. 21st Century USA sketches a country where the strip malls and payday lenders feel like the real monuments. Mike Cooley’s deadpan delivery makes the lines land like hard truths you already knew but did not want to say out loud.

Grievance Merchants takes aim at bad faith and the grievance economy that thrives online. The guitars circle like a warning siren. Heroin Again stares down addiction without melodrama, another Truckers trait, tracing how the crisis crawls through families and towns. Then there is the closer, Awaiting Resurrection, which stretches out and refuses easy catharsis. It feels like a late-night drive on an empty highway, the kind where the yellow lines start to blur and you talk to yourself just to stay awake. The band lets it sprawl, and the patience pays off.

What hits hardest is the balance between specificity and empathy. Hood and Cooley still write character songs, but here the characters are pinned under systems and slogans. The rhythm section never crowds the vocals, and Gonzalez colors the margins with piano and organ that feel churchy one minute and barroom-bleary the next. You can tell this lineup has been road-tested for years. They know when to punch and when to leave air.

Critics heard it too. The album drew strong praise from Rolling Stone and NPR for its clarity and nerve, and it plays like a companion to 2016’s American Band. The timing proved eerie. The Unraveling landed just before touring stopped in 2020, and many of these songs became even heavier as the year unraveled for real. The band later followed with The New OK, pulling from related sessions and fresh material, but this one feels like the postcard that warned what was coming.

If you collect Drive-By Truckers vinyl, this record belongs on the shelf next to Brighter Than Creation’s Dark and American Band. The pressing does right by the low-end thump and the grit of those twin guitars, and the sequencing makes sense on wax, with side breaks that give the heaviest songs a breath. I found my copy flipping through a Melbourne record store while traveling, one of those accidental finds that make you grin, though you can always buy Drive-By Truckers records online if your local shop is dry. Folks hunting for Drive-By Truckers albums on vinyl will know the drill, but if you are new to the band and browsing vinyl records Australia or anywhere else, start here and then work backward.

The Unraveling is not an easy listen, but it is a necessary one. It captures how it felt to live in a specific American moment and it does so with melody, grit, and hard-earned compassion. The guitars still roar, the stories still matter, and the band sounds fully locked in. Put it on loud. Sit with it. Let the songs do their work.