Back in the "no future" early days, punk didn’t offer a great retirement plan. After a record or two of three-chord raging, you could stay the course, turn pop, get clever, or check out altogether, like Sid Vicious or Darby Crash. There were pros and cons to all of these.

Now, you can grab a hat and an acoustic guitar and ride off into the sunset. It’s a standard move, the ol’ alt-country switcheroo, but it wasn’t an obvious choice in 1985, when a gang of artsy, lefty ex-punks from Leeds, England, opened its fourth album with words worthy of the Clash or Johnny Cash: "I was out late the other night/ Fear and whiskey kept me going."

The band was the Mekons, and 30 years after Fear and Whiskey arguably gave birth to alt-country, they’re still going strong—and hitting the whiskey. They return Nov. 27 with Jura, a joint album recorded with ace twangster Robbie Fulks on a boozy 2014 trip to Scotland, and sometime next year, they’ll release the record they cut live in July at Brooklyn’s Jalopy Theatre.

If punky-tonk has become less prevalent on, oh, the last dozen Mekons LPs, co-founder Jon Langford still throws down the hoedown with his Waco Brothers side project. And he hasn’t forgotten why Americana first seemed like a plausible extension of angry UK guitar music.

"Both were concerned with addressing their audience directly," Langford says from Chicago, where he relocated with the Mekons in the mid-'80s. "Someone like Merle Haggard, there wasn’t a real big barrier between him and his audience, even though he was a big star. He was very much a populist, very much speaking and writing in terms that were instantly translatable into the experience of his audience. That’s what punk felt like to me."

The Mekons began drawing these connections in the early '80s, after producers Bill Leader and John Gill hipped them to the raw power of British folk (heard on 1983’s The English Dancing Master EP), Cajun music, reggae, and other stripped-down sounds. At the time, punk was growing staler by the second, and the Mekons—themselves in a transitional phase after a period of inaction—opted to switch up instruments, add violin and accordion, and betray one of the genre’s central conceits.

"Punk was very much about discarding the past," Langford says. "Suddenly, three years later, there were these threads going through the past that were really fascinating."