As a band, Them Dirty Roses date back to 2012, and the Alabama four-piece has been releasing music since 2014. Still, their latest project feels like the group’s coming-out party.
For most of this year, Them Dirty Roses have been slow-rolling Lost in the Valley of Hate & Love Vol. II, an album-length EP they have set for release in May 2025. On Friday, the Roses will officially drop “All Good in the Neighborhood,” the fourth single from the project so far.
“There is a lot of the stuff on this record that we’ve had for years and never played live yet,” says band co-founder and drummer Frank Ford. “That’s new for us. But it’s right there in the oven. I think you won’t be able to tell what’s new and old.”
The Roses are Frank along with his brother, James, on lead vocals and guitar. Ben Crain plays lead guitar, and the bass player is Andrew Davis. The group long ago built a regional following in and around Alabama, but since the pandemic, the Roses have caught in a bigger way. In the past two years, they have opened for the Turnpike Troubadours, Steel Woods, Tanner Usrey, and Southall. Their long hair, blues riffs, and Southern drawls have drawn consistent comparisons to Blackberry Smoke, but the band has a broader base in mind.
“There’s a big, wide range of genres to us,” James Ford tells Rolling Stone. “There’s some country in there. There’s rock flairs to it, then there’s a lot of Southern rock.”
That’s true of “All Good in the Neighborhood.” The band wrote nine of the 10 songs on Lost in the Valley of Hate & Love Vol. II, but this song was the exception. James LeBlanc and Phillip White wrote it, and the Roses heard it while working with LeBlanc and White to produce the EP at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
“We were in the studio, at Fame, messing around,” James Ford says. “And we heard this and just went, ‘That’s cool as shit.’ We changed some lyrics and rearranged some stuff, but once we put the actual music to it, we had it. It’s a real fun one.”
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The Roses are best known for a pair of bluesy rockers. “Cocaine and Whiskey” is their standard show closer. The attention-grabbing crescendo of, “Give me back my cocaine, give me back my whiskey,” is the sort of chorus that fans reflexively scream back to the band. “It got us started,” James says. “The numbers of that song just went crazy. It hit some kind of chord in people.”
Their other staple is “Shake It,” and the two songs accurately reflect the Roses’ stage presence. All four members can command a crowd, and both songs afford them plenty of time to jam. But “All Good in the Neighborhood” is decidedly country. That’s in service of the band’s wish to avoid any one genre.
The Roses’ roots lie in Southern rock, gospel, and metal. James moved to Nashville shortly after high school, and in 2012, he called his brother and suggested they start a band. The other two members followed quickly. “Cocaine and Whiskey” was the first song they recorded (and included on a 2014 self-titled EP), but they spent most of the 2010s as a cover band. In 2018, however, they began writing and playing their own music.
The band views a 2022 East Coast tour with Cody Canada and the Departed as their biggest break. James Ford had grown up a fan of Canada’s previous band, Cross Canadian Ragweed, and hoped to spend a day or two on the tour with Canada. They ended up hanging out every night, sharing stories and music, and left as friends. Canada spread the word of the Roses around his home state of Texas, and the crowds grew.
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“After that, it seemed like — and I don’t know if it was just Cody going around telling people about us — we were accepted in Texas and in the Red Dirt scene,” James Fords says.
Canada says he sees the same energy in Them Dirty Roses as he had in the mid-Nineties when Ragweed started: “They reminded me of myself — ready to party and ready to be serious about making a stand in music. They are determined, kind humans to boot.”
This fall, the Roses are on a headlining tour, including a Sept. 19 hometown show at Mort Glosser Amphitheatre in Gadsden, Alabama, and an Oct. 4 set at the Mil at Cannery Hall in Nashville.
The group released Lost in the Valley of Hate & Love Vol. I in 2023; the upcoming Vol. II was always intended to be viewed as the second in a two-part project. Most of the songs were written years ago and the band intentionally split their favorites among the two volumes, meaning most of the songs they are releasing now have been under wraps for three years or more.
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“Our longtime fans have seen and heard us grow up in real time,” Davis says. “This project is the canvas on which those stories were painted. From desire, to heartbreak, to anger, everything on this EP is real and visceral.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, is set for release on December 13, 2024, via Back Lounge Publishing, and available for pre-order.
