Taylor Swift isn’t the only musician to manage two albums this year. Long-running Alabama band Drive-by Truckers, denied the chance to tour the world in support of their excellent January release, The Unraveling, simply holed up and recorded more songs. The New OK, released in physical formats today after its appearance on streaming services in October, is their 13th album — a document of an unlucky year that is as lyrically bleak as their soulful Americana sound is appealing.
Having once traded in more personal songs, a politicisation began in 2016 with their album American Band, its cover a black-and-white image of the Stars and Stripes at half-mast, its songs largely concerned with gun violence. Co-founder Patterson Hood has become increasingly motivated to show that not all Southern men celebrated the direction the nation has taken.
The shocking video for The New OK’s title track was shot during a violent police response to a Black Lives Matter march in Portland in the summer. “Will we settle for tear-gassed eyes/Staring down the gun?” he asks. Superficially catchy with its ringing guitar riff, The Perilous Night is even more despairing. While others, such as Bruce Springsteen on his recent song Rainmaker, have alluded to the current President with a metaphor, Hood names him directly: “Fascism’s knocking and Trump says: ‘Let them in.’”
A kind of optimism arrives late on with a rowdy Ramones cover — an odd fit on a powerful album that has anger as its central emotion.
