Stream: Drive-By Truckers, ‘Armageddon’s Back in Town’

Kevin Bronson on November 25th, 2019

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It’s the end of the world (or it feels like it every news cycle), and Drive-By Truckers know it.

The venerable Athens, Ga., rockers last week announced that their 12th album — and first in more than three years, which almost constitutes a hiatus for the prolific quintet — would be out Jan. 31. It’s titled “The Unraveling,” produced by longtime collaborator David Barbe and engineered by Grammy-winning Matt Ross-Spang.

“You can’t tell the rabbit from the hat,” they sing on the first single “Armageddon’s Back in Town,” as perfect and concise an analogy for the current state of affairs as anything we’ve heard.

“How do you put these day to day things we’re all living through into the form of a song that we (much less anybody else) would ever want to listen to?” says DBT co-founder Patterson Hood. “How do you write about the daily absurdities when you can’t even wrap your head around them in the first place? I think our response was to focus at the core emotional level. More heart and less cerebral perhaps.

“The past 3 1/2 years were among the most tumultuous our country has ever seen, and the duality between the generally positive state of affairs within our band while watching so many things we care about being decimated and destroyed all around us informed the writing of this album to the core.”

“The Unraveling” will be out via ATO Records.

||| Stream: “Armageddon’s Back in Town”