Drive-By Truckers - Welcome 2 Club XIII (LP)

Drive-By Truckers spent the last few years staring down America’s fractures, then pivoted to memory and self-myth on Welcome 2 Club XIII. Out in June 2022 on ATO Records, it plays like a postcard from the band’s rough-and-ready origin story. The title nods to a real Montgomery, Alabama venue where Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley logged sweaty nights in their pre-Truckers outfit, Adam’s House Cat. You can feel the cigarette haze and cheap beer on these songs, but you also hear hard-won perspective, the kind that comes from three decades of loud rooms, long vans, and sticky greenrooms.

The record kicks off with The Driver, a patient, seven-minute road hymn that builds on Jay Gonzalez’s keys and the twin-guitar weave that has defined the band since Southern Rock Opera. It is classic DBT storytelling about late nights and longer stretches of highway, sung with a hushed clarity rather than their old barroom bark. That choice sets the tone. After the political double punch of The Unraveling and The New OK, this one looks inward. Not soft, just human. You get the wry grin of old running buddies and the quiet ache of time passing in the same breath.

The title track Welcome 2 Club XIII is a roadhouse shuffle with the lights turned up. It’s funny and fond and a little embarrassed, the way good bar stories often are. Patterson tips his hat to the band’s less-than-glam origin and lets the groove do the talking. Margo Price, R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, and Schaefer Llana add backing vocals in the right places, a little lift that feels like friends dropping in rather than a guest-star stunt. That informal, communal spirit is all over the record.

Every Single Storied Flameout might be the sleeper. It lopes along with a gorgeous melody, while the lyrics catalog near-misses and second chances. Cooley’s writing remains deceptively sharp. He can thread a whole lifetime through a couple of lines, then slide back under the hood of the song before you realize how clean the cut was. Maria’s Awful Disclosures, titled after 19th-century scandal literature, has that same Cooley knack for making history feel like a companion to the present. None of it feels lecture-heavy. It plays like postcards from younger days, written by older hands.

Longtime producer David Barbe keeps everything warm and present. The guitars have that familiar thrum, Jay’s piano and organ sit right where the stories need them, and Brad Morgan and Matt Patton move the whole thing with unshowy muscle. It sounds like a band that trusts each other. You can hear air in the room, which is catnip on Welcome 2 Club XIII vinyl. This is the kind of record that breathes on a turntable, the snare crack and harmony swells filling a living room in a way streaming never quite nails.

Critics heard the shift. The album drew smart notices from places like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone for letting personal history shoulder the load. Fans heard it too. At shows, The Driver already feels like a set-opening tone-setter, while the title track slots in like it has been in the crate for years. That is the trick with Drive-By Truckers. Even when they change course, the songs still pull like their best bar-band brawlers.

If you collect Drive-By Truckers vinyl, this sits snug beside Decoration Day and English Oceans, a late-career chapter that rewards long-time ears. The sequencing flows, the lyrics invite replays, and the band’s interplay keeps giving. It is also a handy gateway for anyone stepping in from the Americana side who missed the political thunder of the last two records. You get the grit, the humor, the compassion, and that Athens-by-way-of-Muscle Shoals lineage that runs right through Patterson’s family tree.

I’ve flipped past more than one copy in a Melbourne record store and had to fight the urge to double up. If you’re looking to buy Drive-By Truckers records online, this is an easy add, and one of the most replayable Drive-By Truckers albums on vinyl from the last decade. For searchers and crate-diggers alike, Welcome 2 Club XIII vinyl is a reminder of why this band matters. It isn’t nostalgia for its own sake. It is a stack of stories set to guitars that still know how to glow at 2 a.m., when memory and melody feel like the same thing, and the road out of town keeps calling.