Ole 60

One Liner: Unpolished southern rock with a country tilt

Wikipedia Genre: No Wikipedia - southern rock, sad boy Americana

Home: Hawesville, KY

Sunday.

Thoughts: Love the band name, love their look - like a doofy group of high school buddies who realized they could grow facial hair and wear classic graphic t-shirts to look cool in sloppy photos - and the sound is pretty good.  Not great - you read some comments about them on Reddit and you'd think this was better than Radiohead and REM combined, but it's a pretty solidly rough-around-the-edges garage rock band with a country lilt in the lead singer's vocals.

The band is from Hawesville, KY, which is apparently on the south bank of the Ohio River.  Little is available about them online that isn't fan stuff - comments and postings and whatnot.  Their website has no "About" page and there is no Wikipedia.  What I can tell you is that in February, they popped off and hit #1 on the Apple Country Album chart (over Morgan Wallen and Zach Bryan), even though in my opinion this really does not sound like country music.  More like sad indie backed by southern rock.  But they apparently are blowing up the TikTok and so the kids are just into that sort of thing.  I guess once you've listened to the new Zach Bryan 50,000 times you need something else in that alley.

Two EPs - 2023's three twenty four and 2024's Songs About You.  Ten total songs on Spotify.  And yet you're looking at many millions of streams.  The big man in the catalog is "smoke & a light" from that first EP.  74.4 million streams.

Sounds very much like a garage band of guys with lo-fi recording tools and a recently gleaned sense of their instruments making a jam that they think sounds cool.  Which, super dope!  I wish I was anywhere that cool.  But it definitely lacks polish.  Singer's voice breaks like Rob Thomas at times - listen to the "hot breathin' on another man" line and you'll hear it for sure.  "dust 2 dust" sort of sounds like one of those post-grunge bands like Matchbox 20 who was trying to act like Pearl Jam.  Speaking of Rob Thomas.  Maybe that is why these guys are trying to protect their anonymity - this is just Matchbox 20 with bad moustaches!

No other song tops 13 million, and the tunes from the new disc have not yet caught on.  But instead of just playing you another from the first disc, how about the most popular from the new one.  "Thoughts of You" has 5.6 million streams.

Slide guitar in that one makes it more countri-fied, even if it is still more like a sad indie tune.  I'm cracking jokes on them, but this is all pretty solid.  They should be pretty entertaining to watch.