Red Clay Strays: Conquering Country Music Beyond the Airwaves

As the Red Clay Strays packed up to leave the sessions for their 2024 sophomore album, Made by These Moments , they were confident in what they’d just created. Still, they worried: Would a last-minute mishap mean they’d never get invited back to eminent producer Dave Cobb’s studio?

“We had just made our first record with him, and we were leaving, and [guitarist] Drew [Nix] spilled Coke all over [Cobb’s] freshly painted stairs,” recalls the band’s charismatic frontman, Brandon Coleman. “We were like, ‘You ruined it!’ ”

He needn’t have been concerned: Made by These Moments became the band’s full-length breakthrough, and The Red Clay Strays would soon return to Cobb’s Savannah, Ga., studio to record much of their new album, Grateful , out June 5 — and it would likely take more than just some spilled soda to slow the Alabama group’s momentum. After breaking out on TikTok with the 2022 single “Wondering Why,” the soulful country-rock ensemble has become one of the fastest-rising acts in the country world, with second-line billing at this year’s Stagecoach Festival and its first arena tour on tap. An impressive ascent — especially for a band that doesn’t even necessarily see itself as “country.”

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How the band is classified, Coleman says, “doesn’t matter. I’ve always just said ‘rock’n’roll,’ because we don’t have any fiddles or anything like that. We’re just three electric guitars, bass, drums and piano. “We’re definitely country boys with Southern heritage,” he continues, “but I just never really thought of ourselves as a country music band.”

“This new record is another step away from the country sound,” interjects bassist Andy Bishop, but “we always keep a toe in that country world.”

“So we can go to the CMAs!” Coleman responds.

Today, the band — which, as it happens, won vocal group of the year at last year’s Country Music Association Awards and group of the year at May’s Academy of Country Music Awards — is gathered in a nondescript Southern California office space as it prepares for its Stagecoach play later in the week. The members are known for their stylishness onstage, but over Zoom, they’re just a crew of normal dudes in their late 20s and early 30s, clad in T-shirts (Bishop’s Pat Benatar one takes the cake) and good-naturedly s–t-talking while still marveling at their hard-won success after years of playing to small audiences.

“We started out playing in barrooms,” Coleman says. “The barrooms just got bigger,” guitarist Zach Rishel adds. Either way, as drummer John Hall puts it, “I’m just sipping on Miller Lite.” (Keyboardist Sevans Henderson rounds out the group.)

The band’s unpretentious attitude has resonated with audiences and driven its rapid growth — because The Red Clay Strays haven’t only eschewed pageantry, but the industry machine writ large. “Born and bred in the red dirt clay of South Alabama,” as the band’s website proudly declares, its members remain based in their native Mobile. (Coleman: “What does it matter where you pay your bills?”) They keep the Nashville establishment at arm’s length, even if they mostly chalk it up to better weather and cheaper cost of living.

That outlook extends to its radio philosophy. The band has just one entry to date on Billboard ’s Country Airplay chart — “Wondering Why” logged a week at No. 58 two years ago — which is actually one more than the Strays estimate they’ve had. “It’s ­never been a goal of ours to make a radio song,” Bishop says. “Look how far we have gotten with no radio play. We got a CMA [Award] with three country radio stations playing us, and one of them is our local radio station. People are bending over backward for radio, and especially in the day of social media, I don’t think you have to have it. Honestly, I think radio is dead.” (Coleman qualifies this somewhat: “We’re certainly not going to change to try to get on the radio, but if the radio decides to start playing what we’re doing already, then we’ll take it.”)

So, too, are the aesthetic boxes that once separated genres and subgenres. The Red Clay Strays hail from the storied country-rock lineage of the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd, who its members proudly cite as influences. But their taste goes far beyond that to revered country acts from Waylon Jennings to Tyler Childers, but also The Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Ray Charles. “I found Nirvana when I was 13 and that changed my life,” Hall says. Then again, “When I was 13, top 40 country radio rocked.”

On Grateful , its second album for the Los Angeles-based RCA, the band amalgamated all those influences into its most ambitious creative statement yet — even if the sessions were “very low intensity, very chill,” according to Bishop. Religious themes pervade the album’s lyrics (and the band’s marketing around it) and bleed over to the music, which is supplemented throughout with backup gospel singers. Despite that, “I wouldn’t say we’re a religious band,” Coleman says. “We make music about our life, and God is a big part of our life, so he’s in our music. We’re not trying to be anybody’s worship leaders or spiritual leaders or anything like that, because we’re just dudes playing music.”

But as its platform has grown, and scrutiny of the band has increased, its members have become aware of what the public thinks — not just of its religious leanings, but its political ones, too. In October, the act released the studiously apolitical “People Hatin’,” a well-intentioned plea for Americans of all stripes to tone down incendiary rhetoric. (Sample lyric: “All this arguing is aggravating.”) The song ignited internet backlash, with some criticizing the band for bringing politics into music and others directly linking the song to the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk the prior month.

“Everybody said it was a Charlie Kirk song, but we wrote that song in April last year,” Coleman says. “Everybody in the band, we all have different opinions politically and all that, but we’ve been a band for over 10 years. It wasn’t going to be released first [from Grateful ], and we decided we should put it up first, after Charlie got shot. But that’s not why we wrote the song. The song was written because of issues that we’ve been dealing with for a while now.”

If The Red Clay Strays seek a big tent, they’re pitching one themselves. The band will play its biggest headlining shows yet when it hits more than 30 American arenas from August to November, including its first play at New York’s Madison Square Garden. “It’s all kind of scary,” Bishop admits, “and we just hope people show up to these shows, or we’re going to be playing in empty arenas.”

“When you don’t have a plan,” Coleman reassures him, “you don’t panic when the plan goes wrong.” Bishop promises a “big production” with a custom-built stage, hefty lights and screens and an expanded touring band (“I think half of all our income this year is going to it”) and deadpans, “We’re selling out.” Says Coleman: “I won’t be wearing jumpsuits, though.”

But before any of that, the band will honor the fans who have gotten them this far with the Red Clay Strays Fan Fest in Rexford, Mont., in late June. “It’s in the middle of nowhere, on the border of Canada and Montana, and it’s one of our favorite places to be,” Bishop says. “We usually like to spend a week or so a year just literally doing nothing but hanging out [there]. We wanted to show that to other people.”

“We’ve always liked the idea of trying to give back to the fans somehow or another, and this is just our first sling at it,” Coleman says of the five-day event, which will feature headline performances by The Red Clay Strays, Lukas Nelson and St. Paul & The Broken Bones, as well as “Strays With Stories,” an evening of intimate performances and stories by the band. “Who knows how it’s going to turn out.”

Playing arenas from coast to coast and attracting fans to remote, rural Montana just three years after breaking out on TikTok? Seems like, for The Red Clay Strays, things are going to turn out just fine.

This story appears in the May 30, 2026, issue of Billboard.

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/music/country/red-clay-strays-country-power-players-groundbreaker-1236258395/)._