"If you look at me from a demographic point of view, I am like the perfect Trump voter," Drive-By Truckers co-founder Patterson Hood tells me during a phone call in August in which we discussed his band's new album, American Band, out September 30. "I'm a 52-year-old, white male. I'm from Muscle Shoals, Alabama. That makes me about as archetypal as you can get."

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If you're unfamiliar with the Drive-By Truckers' music, it could be easy to jump to some ugly and bad-faith conclusions about what the band stands for. For two decades now, the southern rock band have been churning out loud, aggressive, and provocative rock 'n' roll—going back to their breakthrough record, Southern Rock Opera (their third studio album, released in 2001), which offered a surprising and nuanced look at Southern identity at the turn of the millennium filtered through the eyes of a band that came of age in the American South just after the most tumultuous years of the Civil Rights Movement. It also revitalized the concept album conceit, as well as the hardboiled sound of the band's major influence, Lynyrd Skynyrd—the deadly plane crash that killed singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and back-up singer Cassie Gaines (and nearly ended Skynyrd's career as a whole) serves as a major narrative device.

Southern Rock Opera, and the Drive-By Truckers' catalog as a whole, cast a critical eye on recent history—history that's on the verge of being forgotten and thus repeated. The infamous former Alabama governor George Wallace, for example, whose staunch segregationist views fueled his popularity in the early '60s and later reversal and racial pandering earned him respect in the late '70s, turns up as a character when he meets the Devil upon entering Hell. "Racism is a worldwide problem," Hood says in the spoken-word track "The Three Great Alabama Icons," "but thanks to George Wallace, it's always a little more convenient to play it with a Southern accent."

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Hood and company—Mike Cooley in particular, who has served as the longest-running co-frontman of the band amid several personnel changes throughout its career—speak often of the world's complications and conflicts, both personal and political. It's the former that often serves as the most poetic, particularly in the song "The Southern Thing," which aims to show that racism and hatred aren't values shared throughout the region. ("Proud of the glory, stare down the shame," Hood yells. "Duality of the southern thing.")

Personally, hearing Southern Rock Opera for the first time was a seminal experience. I had grown up as a gay kid in rural Virginia, where bigotry and hyper-masculinity were worn on every camouflaged sleeve; shame about who I was, secretly (as a queer person) and openly (as a descendant of Confederates) wasn't something I saw anyone else express before. Yet there were the Drive-By Truckers, an group of southern rockers who looked and sounded like the bands I grew up hearing on the local classic rock station, but who sang about the South's uncomfortable history and the legacy any thoughtful and empathetic person must carry along with them.

Drive-By Truckers (l-r): Matt Patton, Brad Morgan, Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, Jay Gonzalez Danny Clinch

On the band's eleventh studio album, American Band, the Drive-By Truckers (now consisting of vocalists/guitarists Hood and Cooley, drummer Brad Morgan, keyboardist Jay Gonzalez, and bassist Matt Patton) are proving once again that the personal and the political are inseparable. There's a particular urgency to the album, one that holds a mirror up to our current time rather than attempting to process our collective past. "I think we're living in a moment in time that's going to be given great historical significance when people look back on it," Hood says, pinpointing that the history he's suddenly chronicling through song is the kind that's being written today. "I have a feeling people are going to look back on this moment in time as a very pivotal turning point. It is a scary thought if we turn the wrong way."

I have a feeling people are going to look back on this moment in time as a very pivotal turning point. It is a scary thought if we turn the wrong way.

Their newest material, Hood explains, came out of them quickly—to such an extreme that even they were surprised by their efficiency. "We essentially recorded it in six days, and that wasn't planned," he says. "The first three days of recording was just supposed to be us going in, working on some ideas, maybe getting two or three songs that are keepers out of it—just seeing what happens to get our feet wet and start the process." Those brainstorming days proved fruitful, however, with the band ultimately finishing the bulk of the record in less than a week's time. "We took the holidays off and came back in the beginning of January for four days," Hood continues. "We finished the record in three of those days. We spent the fourth day just sitting around listening to what we had done, kind of going, 'Wow, holy shit. We just made a goddamned record in six days!"

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Perhaps it was dumb luck, perhaps it was something more cosmic. Maybe the band didn't have a label-proscribed deadline to hit, but rather a more emotional, philosophical one. "I said, 'I think we've made our fucking record,'" Hood says. "Hell, let's get it out and do this thing, you know? Let's go out and talk about this shit this fall."

Now, on the eve of a incredibly bitter election, and in the thick of a tumultuous time in American history that rivals the one that saw its close just before the Drive-By Truckers themselves solidified their personalities, beliefs, and identities, American Band is an important record that offers an anxious view of the future, an uneasy look at the past, and a contemptuous vision of our present that is as emotionally gut-busting as it is musically.

Many of our songs have been period pieces about other moments in time that are still relevant today

Hood contends, however, that he and his bandmates didn't set out to defiantly say something about our current time, although he admits that he recognizes it as a departure from what the Drive-By Truckers are known for. On the surface, the Drive-By Truckers are a pastiche of '70s arena rock with a particularly progressive perspective, but their real value is the nearly literary way in which they meld together the past and the present through their lyrics. "I've used the analogy about Chinatown so much talking about our work," Hood says. "Chinatown was made in '74 and was so much a film about that moment in time, but it was set in the '30s. Many of our songs have been period pieces about other moments in time that are still relevant today."

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But rather than writing about the past, Hood is now writing about the present. Take, for example, "What It Means," which could stand as a Nashville-tinged Black Lives Matter anthem with Hood's warbling drawl pairing nicely with a plodding bass line and organ. But the lyrics, such as the lines "He was running down the street / when they shot him in his tracks" and "If you say it wasn't racial / When they shot him in his tracks / Well I guess that means that you aren't black," are both specific and vague—he might be singing about one man in particular, but at this point our recent history seems to repeat itself weekly as black bodies fall to the ground at the hands of white policemen with guns. "In some town in Missouri," Hood sings, "but it could happen anywhere." (A subject more easily recognizable: the deadly 2015 mass shooting in Oregon on which Hood ruminates in "Guns of Umpqua.")

It's not just a thematic shift that the Drive-By Truckers have pursued—they've also progressed visually. American Band is the first album since 1999's Pizza Deliverance not to feature artwork by Wes Freed, whose ghoulish designs invoke Southern mythology—what Flannery O'Connor once described as "the Christ-haunted South." Instead, the band went with a striking photo of an American flag caught mid-flight in the middle of a pole, an image that has come to represent the violent era in which we live, and one that mournfully represents our culture's collective surrender. "It seems like almost every time we see a flag pole anymore," Hood says, "the flag's at half-mast."

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But despite Mike Cooley's soulful and somber "Surrender Under Protest" and Hood's thoughtful "What It Means," two standout tracks on an album filled with fierce and poignant songs, the album doesn't represent a sudden shift toward the depressive, nor are the Drive-By Truckers ready to admit defeat. If anything, Hood remains firm and outspoken. Last summer he penned an op-ed for theNew York Times Magazine in the wake of the Charleston shooting, supporting the removal of the contentious Confederate flag. ("You've got to move past this," he tells me. "It's slowing us down as a culture, as a society, to have our heads up our asses.") He continues to fight for social justice, expressing dismay that racism continues to tear America apart eight years after the election of Barack Obama. ("It is important that a band of middle-aged, southern rock dudes say, 'Black Lives Matter.' I'm going to say it proudly, and loudly, and if you don't like it, fuck you.")

It's slowing us down as a culture, as a society, to have our heads up our asses.

But it's Donald Trump that infuriates him the most—particularly as he sees men of his generation and origin selfishly throw their support behind him. "I think it needs to be voiced that we don't all feel that way, you know?" Hood says. "I'll stand here with my southern accent and say, 'Fuck you, Donald Trump. You do not speak for me. You do not speak for my family. You do not speak for my values. You do not speak for my vision of what this country could and should be.'"

It's good to hear Patterson Hood say these things, loudly and proudly. And the accent with which he says them is a comfort, a reminder that what's on the surface doesn't necessarily reveal what's lying underneath. The fervor with which he speaks these truths reflects itself on American Band, which just might be the most vital and important rock 'n' roll album of the year.

Tyler Coates Senior Culture Editor Tyler Coates is the Senior Culture Editor at Esquire.com.

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