For at least a few years now, country music has been spilling over into all walks of musical life, and it’s a trend that just keeps ramping up. Pop stars like Beyoncé, Lana Del Rey, Post Malone, and Chappell Roan have embraced the genre, while Shaboozey became a star by turning an interpolation of a mid-aughts rap classic into one of the biggest country hits in recent memory. Established indie musicians like Angel Olsen, Julien Baker, and Torres have taken full-on country detours, while country megastar Zach Bryan has made a bid for indie crossover–Bon Iver collaboration included. There’s also a whole crop of newer artists combining country music and indie rock in a way that feels both familiar and new, and it’s made for some of the most exciting new bands and solo artists in all of indie. As for why indie is embracing country music so strongly right now, MJ Lenderman suggests that “maybe there’s a little bit of a rebellion” against hearing one too many people say they listen to “everything but country.”
Lenderman has found himself more at the center of this conversation than perhaps anyone–as a solo artist, the guitarist of Wednesday, and a prolific collaborator–and given the rapidly-rising popularity of both his career and Wednesday’s, I’d wager that they’ve both caused the “everything but country” crowd to eat their words. They’re also just the tip of the iceberg for this new generation of countrified indie rock, so if you want more where they came from, you’re very much in luck. On top of having a sound that’s really hitting at the moment, most of these artists are also part of one of the most exciting American DIY music communities in recent memory; you can feel the ways that they feed off of one another, and the ways that their albums are in conversation with each other. They’re collectively crafting a vibe that’s very worth diving into, and for a helpful way to do that, I’ve put together a list of 10 artists currently shaping this particular sound.
This is, of course, not the first time in history that indie music and country have crossed paths. Country-leaning indie artists like Songs: Ohia, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Silver Jews, Lambchop, and Califone are stylistic predecessors to this new movement, as are established alt-country acts like Drive-By Truckers, Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch, and Uncle Tupelo, and country-punk pioneers like the Meat Puppets. (Not to mention Neil Young is a godfather of all of the above.) Some people refer to these new bands as “alt-country” too, but I think they’re different enough that they deserve their own unique descriptor. The ahead-of-their-time Chicago band Ratboys half-jokingly coined it “post-country,” which I like, though I’ve personally been calling it “indie-country.” Ever so slightly different than the alternative country artists of yesteryear, these artists tend to make country-leaning music with overtly indie rock signifiers–you’re as likely to hear echoes of Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, or Pavement in these records as you are Emmylou Harris or Gram Parsons. And I think that’s a big part of why indie rock fanbases have latched on so firmly to this subset of artists too. Even country skeptics seem to agree: this is some of the best real-deal indie rock we’ve gotten in years.
Read on for my list of 10 artists shaping the current indie-country boom, in no particular order, followed by a few honorable mentions…
MJ Lenderman
More so than anyone else you’re about to read about, MJ Lenderman is everywhere. For years, he was bouncing back and forth between touring with his own band MJ Lenderman & the Wind and touring as Wednesday’s guitarist, and his schedule was so jam-packed that it seemed like he never took a day off of being on the road. But he definitely did, because he found time to record his excellent 2024 album Manning Fireworks and play as a band member on records by multiple other artists, some of whom I’ll talk about later on this list. (He has since ceased touring as a member of Wednesday but he still made their new record with them, appears in their new music videos, and played Colbert with them in May.) He’s also played with a number of his heroes, including Dinosaur Jr, Drive-By Truckers, and Yo La Tengo. This year alone, both Wilco and Jason Isbell have drafted him for festivals they curated. And his reach expands into other corners of the DIY/indie music world too; one of this year’s best songs is MJ Lenderman’s version of This Is Lorelei’s 2024 bedroom pop gem “Dancing in the Club.”
It’s very easy to see why so many other musicians are attracted to his work. When you listen to his four proper studio albums, see The Wind’s delightfully jammy live show, or listen to their genuinely great live album, you encounter an artist who connects the dots between all the music mentioned in this paragraph so far while maintaining a strong identity of his own. His observational wit, humor, and pop-cultural references make his lyrics live in your head as rent-free as his subtle hooks. On top of all that, he’s also a guitar hero who graduated from the school of J Mascis and Thurston Moore. And like Mascis, he comes off chill and humble, no matter how many superlatives are bestowed upon him.
Wednesday
In addition to sharing much of the same personnel, Wednesday and MJ Lenderman have been rising in tandem with each other. Wednesday signed to a big label (Dead Oceans) and had their big breakthrough with 2023’s Rat Saw God, and then MJ did the same with his 2024 ANTI- debut. It was all MJ Lenderman all the time for a while and now Wednesday are back in the spotlight with an album that’s shaping up to be their best yet, Bleeds, which arrives on September 19 via Dead Oceans. Two songs are out from it so far, and each one finds Wednesday mastering a different end of the indie-country spectrum. “Elderberry Wine” is quite possibly Wednesday’s best straight-up country song yet, and also one of 2025’s very best singles so far, while “Wound Up Here (By Holdin On)” begins with a riff that sounds like it could’ve come from Wednesday’s North Carolina indie forebears Polvo before turning into a grungy, shoegazy explosion. These songs feel like as much a step up from Rat Saw God as that album was from 2021’s also-great Twin Plagues; bandleader Karly Hartzman’s songwriting has never been more arresting, and as she herself puts it, Bleeds is “the quintessential ‘Wednesday Creek Rock’ album… This is what Wednesday songs are supposed to sound like. We’ve devoted a lot of our lives to figuring this out—and I feel like we did.” The seeds were planted and growing throughout all of Wednesday’s back catalog–including their 2022 covers album Moving the Leaves Instead of Piling ’em Up, which ranges from covers of alt/indie rock heroes Smashing Pumpkins and Wipers’ Greg Sage to alt-country vets Drive-By Truckers and Vic Chesnutt to country music icons Gary Stewart and Roger Miller–and it really does feel like the Wednesday sound is fully blossoming on Bleeds. Then again, I would’ve said the same about Rat Saw God two years ago, so the trajectory they’re on already has me wondering how far Wednesday might still go.
Waxahatchee
Narrowing this list down to 10 was tough and I almost left Waxahatchee off–not because she isn’t one of the best to ever do indie-country (she is), but because her career predates the current indie-country boom by over a decade and she was already established as a non-country artist before moving in a twangier direction on 2020’s Saint Cloud and 2024’s Tigers Blood. But I decided this list wouldn’t feel complete without her. Unlike some of the other established artists who have been pivoting to country, the indie-country direction she took on her last two albums felt more like a natural progression than a sudden detour, and this current version of Waxahatchee feels like the ultimate version of Waxahatchee. (I’m still personally more attached to the raw, wounded indie rock of 2013’s Cerulean Salt than any of her other albums, but I think there’s no denying that current Waxahatchee is ultimate Waxahatchee.) These last two Waxahatchee albums have also directly shaped this new version of country-leaning indie rock just as much as the newer artists have. Waxahatchee leader Katie Crutchfield came up in the punk scene with a DIY ethos that a lot of the current indie-country bands share, and MJ Lenderman is now one of her closest collaborators. He plays guitar on Tigers Blood and duets with Katie on the album’s best song, “Right Back To It,” and the two have since performed live together on multiple occasions and also teamed up for a Lucinda Williams cover. At this point, she has the rare distinction within this scene of being a forebear and a contemporary all at once.
Florry
While Florry’s 2023 album The Holey Bible literally sounded like people sitting around a campfire and singing folk and country songs together, this year’s Sounds Like… Florry! captures the energy of the live rock band that’s been on the road these past couple years, and it’s the best representation of their sound yet. The jammy, guitar-solo-happy band sound like the Grateful Dead and Crazy Horse at their scrappiest, with a little bit of Dinosaur Jr’s sludgefeast in the mix, and they’ve got the memorable hooks to bring those instrumental freakouts back down to earth. (There’s some Bob Dylan in there too.) If that combo of bands sounds a little like MJ Lenderman & the Wind on paper, it may come as no surprise that The Wind member Colin Miller (who also released a great solo album this year) co-produced and engineered the album at the MJ Lenderman/Wednesday crew’s go-to studio Drop of Sun, and they also finished writing the album during a three-day session at the now-defunct Haw Creek compound where Wednesday/Wind members used to live. The Holey Bible sounded secluded from the world, but Sounds Like… is a melting pot of all the influence you absorb and all the places you go as a traveling band.
Greg Freeman
Like Florry, Greg Freeman hails from Vermont, and his 2022 debut album I Looked Out (released on the small DIY label Bud Tapes) gained him a lot of comparisons to Songs: Ohia’s Jason Molina, who MJ Lenderman was also frequently compared to early on in his career. The Songs: Ohia influence is still noticeable on his Transgressive/Canvasback debut Burnover, but even more noticeable is how much Greg has developed a voice of his own. The album could just as easily be compared to anything from Pavement’s shaggy indie rock to the alt-country of A.M.-era Wilco, and its wide musical range spans from revved-up rockers to blissed-out ballads with plenty else in between. The album features contributions from a bunch of friends from the Burlington, VT scene, which Greg tells Stereogum “seems a little more low-key than Asheville” but “definitely [has] a similar vibe,” and it includes such alt-country signifiers as pedal steel, fiddle, and group harmony vocals. Greg’s also a natural-born songwriter; a vivid, observant lyricist with an ability to capture little snapshots of life and turn them into hummable refrains. There’s substance to his songs, layers of depth that go beyond the twangy embellishments on the surface.
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band
Just months after a stint opening the first leg of MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks tour (and covering Silver Jews, John Prine, Warren Zevon, and Neil Young songs with him during encores), Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band released “New Threats from the Soul.” The remarkable, nearly-ten-minute song is the opening track and lead single from the band’s sophomore album, and it set a high bar that the rest of the album clears with ease. All the covers that Ryan did with MJ Lenderman should give you an idea of what ballpark Ryan’s own music is in, but the artist he’s been compared to most is the late Silver Jews/Purple Mountains leader David Berman, who called Ryan “the best lyricist who’s not a rapper going” in 2018, the year Ryan’s previous band State Champion released their final album Send Flowers. Ryan’s also gained the support of indie-country pioneer Will Oldham (aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy), who lent his voice to New Threats from the Soul, and Catherine Irwin of alt-country veterans Freakwater, who sings on both Roadhouse Band albums. The David Berman comparison comes through in Ryan’s grizzled baritone and conversational lyricism, and the Roadhouse Band also have a jammy aspect that extends from their live shows to their albums, making lengthy songs like “New Threats from the Soul” worth every second. (That’s not even the longest song on the new album; most are over seven minutes and one is nearly 12.) And keeping things weird and “indie,” the Roadhouse Band’s earthy alt-country jams borrow from beat-driven electronic music too.
Ratboys
The inventors of the (half-joking) term “post-country” were doing it before it was cool, and the stars aligned in 2023 when this whole subgenre started to become a widely-discussed trend and Ratboys released their best album yet, The Window. Ratboys have long-standing roots in the emo and math rock-centric Chicago-area DIY scene–they were one of the first non-emo bands signed to Topshelf, their drummer Marcus Nuccio is/was in a number of emo bands (Dowsing, Pet Symmetry, The Please & Thank Yous), and their latest album includes a nod to Maps & Atlases–and they’ve also long embraced alt-country pioneers like Uncle Tupelo, Lucinda Williams, and The Jayhawks. As singer/guitarist Julia Steiner put it in 2019, “post-country” is indie music that’s influenced by alt-country, rather than being alt-country in and of itself. That’s a subtle but important distinction, and it’s something that Ratboys have been doing–and getting better and better at–for over a decade. They confirmed in March that they finished tracking their followup to The Window, and judging by the run this band has been on, I think it’s safe to assume they’re about to meet the moment once again.
Fust
The Bristol, Virginia-born, Durham, North Carolina-based Aaron Dowdy launched Fust as a solo project in 2017, and it’s since grown into a full band whose third album Big Ugly came out this year on Dear Life Records, the label run by members of Friendship (and Fust member Frank Meadows) that also released MJ Lenderman’s Boat Songs. Located just a few hours away from the Asheville scene, Fust recorded Big Ugly and its 2023 predecessor Genevieve with frequent Wednesday/MJ Lenderman collaborator Alex Farrar at his studio Drop of Sun, and Aaron told Steven Hyden in a recent interview for UPROXX that Wednesday and MJ’s “visibility opened up a kind of legibility for us… what’s going on in that region, and also a kind of comfort with that kind of song and that kind of imagery.” In that same interview, Aaron namedropped alt-country duo Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, seeing Old Crow Medicine Show cover The Band’s “The Weight” at 11 years old, Neil Young, and Van Morrison as formative influences, but he also says he always liked “really fucked-up music” like Pere Ubu’s The Modern Dance. That all comes through on Big Ugly, which funnels the countrified side of classic rock radio through lo-fi slacker rock tendencies. Friendship singer Dan Wriggins calls the album “beer-fisted radio country from a post-verbal hermit,” as well as “Southern mountain rock, Southern lit, made and dedicated to the inextricable entity of land and people, to visions of community and utopia and testament to erosion.” So much of what sets this scene apart from other indie rock scenes is that this is the indie rock of small, rural towns–not big cities–and Fust embodies that, from the regional imagery to the Southern slang.
Lily Seabird
Lily Seabird lives in a self-described “hippie house” in Burlington, VT called “Trash Mountain,” which is also the name of her third album, released earlier this year on Lame-O Records. Raised in rural Pennsylvania, Lily first gave New York City a shot as a college freshman at The New School, but she ended up wanting something a little slower and quieter than NYC so she transferred to UVM and got immersed in the Burlington music scene. One of the first people she met in that scene was Greg Freeman, who’s become one of her most frequent collaborators; they play on each other’s records and they’ve been in each other’s live bands too. (Also in that scene is the shoegazy band Robber Robber, whose Zack James drums on all of her albums and whose Nina Cates plays bass on the new one.) Lily played in a punk band in high school, and she had some speaker-busting Dinosaur Jr-worthy guitar on her 2024 album Alas, but the new album is quieter and more acoustic-based. “In my early twenties I felt a pressure to make really loud rock music,” she told The FADER earlier this year. “At some point, the idea that nobody wants to hear me play acoustic guitar got drilled into my head.” Eventually, she said, “something just clicked. And I was like, what the fuck? I’m just gonna do it.” As cool as the noisier material was, the earthier vibes of Trash Mountain suit Lily so well that it’s almost hard to believe she ever shied away from it. It’s her best album yet.
Brown Horse
The indie-country boom (not surprisingly) tends to be very US-centric, but one of the genre’s best newer bands hails from Norwich, England: Brown Horse. They began their life gigging around their local pub scene as a folk group before adopting a more electrified country rock sound on their acclaimed 2024 debut album Reservoir, and 15 months later they released the even better All The Right Weaknesses. Uncut‘s 9/10 review of the album points out that Reservoir gradually came together before the band had much of a following. After it came out, the band’s profile rose, relentless touring ensued, and the energy of the road resulted in a louder, looser, more collaborative followup. The review makes comparisons to Crazy Horse, The Band, R.E.M., and David Berman, and points out that the album also makes a lyrical reference to indie-country pioneer Bill Callahan. Another 9/10 review from PopMatters also compares the band to Songs: Ohia, Adrianne Lenker, Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, and Richard Buckner. All of these comparisons should give you a very good idea of what to expect, and Brown Horse already stand tall next to established names like these. They’ve got three vocalists in Emma Tovell, Patrick Turner, and Phoebe Troup, and the album is powered by a fiery mix of rugged Crazy Horse-esque guitars, soaring pedal steel, and uplifting choruses. It only takes a couple listens to Brown Horse for them to feel like a band you’ve known your whole life, and even then, there’s something new and refreshing about them that stands out from every single artist they might remind you of.
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5 Honorable Mentions
* Indie mainstays Julien Baker and Torres put on the cowboy hats for this year’s overtly country collaboration Send A Prayer My Way.
* Home Is Where are more associated with “fifth wave emo” than with indie-country, but they made a straight-up alt-country album with this year’s Hunting Season that fans of all the music on this list would probably enjoy.
* MJ Lenderman & the Wind member Colin Miller is also a solo artist, whose great new album Losin’ has MJ Lenderman on drums and guitar, as well as Wednesday/The Wind members Ethan Baechtold (bass, keys, aux percussion) and Xandy Chelmis (pedal steel), and it scratches a very similar itch to Wednesday/Lenderman.
* Friendship don’t really strike me as country enough for this list but they do get called alt-country and they’re very closely tied to this scene and we’re huge fans. Their new album is one of our favorite albums of the year so far.
* Dutch Interior also released one of our favorite albums of this year so far with Moneyball, which has a mix of ’90s indie rock, alt-country, and slowcore that’s right in this same ballpark.