ALT-COUNTRY is having a proper moment again — only this time it’s being driven by bands in their 20s and early 30s who found it for themselves, not via gen X parents’ car stereos.

On both sides of the Atlantic, young indie acts are pulling from the subgenre that emerged in the late 80s and early 90s, when former punks such as Uncle Tupelo (which featured future Wilco co-founder Jeff Tweedy) and the Bottle Rockets started swapping noise for fiddles, banjos and acoustic guitars. In the UK, Brown Horse and Vegas Water Taxi are leaning into pedal steel, while Westside Cowboy and Little Grandad nod to early Wilco’s spiky rootsiness and Wyatt head into slacker country-rock territory.

In the US, the current indie-rock names in the mix include Waxahatchee, Wednesday and MJ Lenderman, alongside Florry, Ratboys, Thomas Dollbaum, Fust, SG Goodman, Lily Seabird and Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band. Ratboys’ Julia Steiner says the appeal is taking “really simple ingredients” and pushing them somewhere “more freaky, more balls to the wall”.

Little Grandad are living proof you can stumble into the whole thing. The London quartet started playing last year without even knowing what alt-country was, then got tipped off by Brixton Windmill’s Tim, went digging beyond Wilco, and earlier this summer signed a three-album deal with Communion.

London briefly turned into alt-country central during the interview week: Brown Horse served as house band for a night honouring late singer-songwriter Jason Molina’s songs (with guests including Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor and Goat Girl’s Lottie Pendlebury), Wilco played with Hovvdy opening, and Vermont’s Greg Freeman sold out two club shows.

Brown Horse’s Emma Tovell traces their shift to a 2022 Black Deer festival booking: watching Drive-By Truckers, then catching Wilco and SG Goodman, pushed them to “start amplifying stuff”. And as audiences for live guitar music skew younger, Steiner reckons the pull is simple: earnest storytelling and “music that feels really human” in a screen-heavy world.