The Year in Roots Rock 2024: Country Rock, Alt-Country, and the Records That Mattered

A Year When Genre Lines Got Interesting

December 2024 offers a useful vantage point on what roots rock actually looked like over the previous twelve months. Not because the genre announced itself with a landmark album or a defining moment, but because 2024 was the year its edges, the places where country rock, alternative country, indie folk, and classic rock traditions blurred into each other, became its most interesting territory.

The mainstream conversation was dominated by a single question: was Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter a country album? The critical consensus, as WPLN Nashville Public Radio documented in its year-end crossover retrospective, was that the more useful question was what it revealed about the genre's gatekeeping tendencies and whose crossover attempts the industry chose to validate. Cowboy Carter was passed over by the CMA Awards, even as it put Linda Martell, the first Black woman to reach the country charts in the early 1970s, back into the cultural conversation.

Beneath that larger story, though, 2024 generated a genuinely strong body of work in the roots rock and alt-country space. What follows is From The Stem's editorial perspective on where the genre stood, what the year's best records communicated, and what it all suggests about roots rock's most interesting near-term trajectory.

The Year's Best Roots and Alt-Country Records

**Waxahatchee, Tigers Blood** Produced by Brad Cook and featuring MJ Lenderman, Kathryn Crutchfield's fifth record as Waxahatchee is among the most fully realized indie rock albums with country and roots textures released in recent years. Bearded Gentlemen Music ranked it first on its 2024 indie twang list, noting standouts "Right Back to It," "Crowbar," and "Evil Spawn." The album is rooted in Americana without being nostalgic, it uses pedal steel and acoustic arrangements as emotional tools rather than genre signifiers.

**Johnny Blue Skies, Passage Du Desir** Sturgill Simpson's rechristened identity allowed him to move further into territory that had always been latent in his work: 1970s nostalgia, blues, Pink Floyd-inflected rock. Passage Du Desir is less immediately commercial than Sound & Fury and more self-possessed than A Sailor's Guide to Earth, a roots rock record in the original sense of an artist digging into their actual influences rather than performing a genre. Songs like "Jupiter's Faerie" and "Right Kind of Dream" reward patient listening.

**MJ Lenderman, Manning Fireworks** Lenderman, a member of the band Wednesday and Waxahatchee collaborator, delivered one of 2024's quietest critical successes: a solo record of twangy, countrified rock that owed as much to classic rock as to any contemporary indie tradition. "She's Leaving You" and "Wristwatch" demonstrated a songwriter with a distinct sensibility and enough guitar craft to make the genre's familiar textures feel newly inhabited.

**Kacey Musgraves, Deeper Well** Accused in some quarters of a "pop detour," Deeper Well is more accurately a folk-Americana record made by a country artist with enough commercial standing to record in New York rather than Nashville. WPLN noted its "pristine, pastoral folk textures" and its collaboration with Leon Bridges on "Superbloom." The album's willingness to move away from genre convention while remaining emotionally grounded is a model for what roots crossover can look like when it's working.

**Cody Jinks, Change the Game** Independent outlaw country from a Texas artist who has built a substantial audience entirely outside the Nashville mainstream. Change the Game reinforces what Jinks has demonstrated over a decade: that a direct-to-fan touring and releasing model can sustain a viable roots rock career without major label infrastructure. "Sober Thing" and the title track represent the album's range.

**Orville Peck, Stampede** A duets album featuring Willie Nelson, Allison Russell, Mickey Guyton, Nathaniel Rateliff, Margo Price, Midland, and Noah Cyrus, among others. Stampede is less unified than Peck's earlier work but valuable as a document of the breadth of artists willing to engage with his theatrical outlaw country persona. "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other" (a Willie Nelson cover featuring the man himself) is the highlight.

**Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Past is Still Alive** Alynda Segarra's most direct roots statement to date, leaning into twangy indie folk with a political and emotional edge. Bearded Gentlemen Music described "Snake Plant (The Past is Still Alive)" as a standout, noting the album's "pessimistic/political lyrics" within a firmly roots-based sonic framework.

The Crossover Question

What 2024 made visible is that the phrase "crossover" means something different depending on the direction of travel. WPLN's year-end analysis traced several trajectories: pop artists (Beyoncé, Noah Kahan, Post Malone) moving toward country gestures; country artists (Kacey Musgraves, Tenille Townes) moving toward indie and folk textures; and roots trios like Amythyst Kiah, Kaia Kater, and Sarah Jarosz transitioning from virtuosic folk pickers to artists incorporating "pop-rock and jazz-pop refinement."

The common thread is that in 2024, genre identity in roots music was increasingly a choice rather than a constraint. Shaboozey's "A Bar Song (Tipsy)", described by WPLN as "2024's most popular slice of country music", emerged from a hip-hop background, fusing country and rap in a way that felt organic rather than calculated. His appearance on Cowboy Carter's "SPAGHETTI" alongside Beyoncé brought that origin story into the mainstream conversation.

For roots rock specifically, the meaningful development is not that the genre is disappearing into pop. It is that the most interesting work is happening at the genre's borders, and that artists who are genuinely fluent in multiple traditions (blues, country, rock, folk) have more creative latitude than the genre's more conservative defenders would admit.

What the Year Suggests About Roots Rock's Direction

Several things stand out about the 2024 roots rock landscape looking back from December:

The independent model is viable. Cody Jinks, Orville Peck, and others have built substantial careers without major label support by prioritizing direct audience relationships, regional touring, and consistent release schedules. This is not a new observation, but 2024 added more data points.

Producer choices matter enormously in roots music. Waxahatchee's Brad Cook, who has also produced Big Thief and Hand Habits, brings a signature acoustic clarity to roots recordings that is immediately distinguishable. The producer's relationship to the tradition, whether they treat country and folk textures as genuine influences or as aesthetic decoration, shapes the record's emotional register.

Critical acclaim and commercial success remain imperfectly correlated. Tigers Blood received widespread critical attention; The Great American Bar Scene by Zach Bryan (a massive commercial success with features from Bruce Springsteen and John Mayer) landed differently. Both albums exist simultaneously in the roots rock conversation, which is a reasonable measure of the genre's current breadth.

The blues thread is always present. From Johnny Blue Skies' blues-rock textures to Kacey Musgraves' use of gospel and Americana roots, the blues influence that underlies both rock and country reasserts itself whenever roots music is operating at its best. That influence is not always foregrounded, but it is consistently present.

From The Stem covers the roots rock space with a commitment to tracing those threads honestly, where they originate, how they move through different genre traditions, and what they sound like when contemporary artists engage with them authentically.

FAQ

What counts as "roots rock" in 2024? Roots rock is a broad term covering music that draws on country, blues, folk, and classic rock traditions without fully belonging to any single one. In 2024, it encompassed artists as different as Waxahatchee (indie folk-rock), Cody Jinks (outlaw country), and Johnny Blue Skies (psychedelic country-rock).

**Was Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter a roots rock record?** Cowboy Carter is a pop record that extensively engages with country and roots music history. Its inclusion of Linda Martell and coverage of the genre's African American roots makes it a significant cultural document, even if it doesn't sit neatly within the roots rock genre as typically defined.

Who were the most commercially successful roots rock artists of 2024? Zach Bryan and Shaboozey had the largest commercial reach in the country-adjacent space, while Kacey Musgraves maintained substantial streaming numbers. Independent artists like Cody Jinks and Orville Peck built significant audience bases without entering the mainstream chart conversation.

What is "indie twang"? "Indie twang" is an informal term for indie rock music that incorporates country and Americana textures, pedal steel, acoustic guitar, country song structures, without fully adopting the commercial country identity. Waxahatchee, MJ Lenderman, and Hurray for the Riff Raff are representative examples.

How does 2024 roots rock compare to earlier decades? Unlike the 1990s alt-country movement centered on Uncle Tupelo and early Wilco, 2024 roots rock is less defined by a coherent scene and more by individual artists drawing on a shared set of influences independently. The connective tissue is genre fluency rather than geographic or social community.

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