Ideas Festival Emory

Since releasing their first album There Is a Bomb in Gilead in 2012, the road-worn Birmingham, Alabama band – singer and guitarist Lee Bains, bassist Adam Williamson, and drummer Blake Williamson – has built a reputation as being what NPR calls “punks revved up by the hot-damn hallelujah of Southern rock” who carry on “the Friday-night custom of burning down the house,” a raw live sound that they captured with Texas punk producer Tim Kerr on studio albums Dereconstructed (2014) and Youth Detention (2017) before recording a full-on live album at their favorite hometown dive, Live at the Nick (2019).
Their work has come to be known, too, for Bains’s lyrics and their literate, incisive social commentary on the band’s beloved homeplace, leading him to publish poetry in the New Yorker and speak at universities from Mississippi to Sweden. Bains and the Williamson brothers can also be found collaborating with artists like Lonnie Holley and Swamp Dogg, lending their bombast to truck-bed protests of Donald Trump and Roy Moore, playing benefit shows for striking Alabama coal miners and Southern Black LGBTQ liberation organizations, and presenting gospel-music live streams for Birmingham and Atlanta food banks.