“Backbone,” out September 4th, leans all the way into its work-song premise, literally. The track opens with the sound of a shovel hitting dirt before stomps, claps, bass, and acoustic guitar pile on top of it, and that shovel sound has a good story behind it: Joseph Turner first faked it with necklaces during early recording before going back and tracking an actual shovel to anchor the rhythm. Turner leads the project, with a rotating cast of collaborators making up The Dudes of Hazard, and here they lean into a dusty, Colter Wall-adjacent strain of Americana and acoustic roots rock that sits somewhere between blues and barroom singalong.
The groove here is very tight, and honestly it already wins based on just that. The production quality is great too, giving the track a genuinely pumping feel, like it’s pushing you forward with real momentum rather than just riding a steady tempo. That physicality matches the song’s subject matter well, a message about perseverance and digging in that never tips into anything heavy-handed or preachy. Gang vocals give it a communal, front-porch energy, and a harmonica solo alongside a guitar solo adds to the dusty Southern character before the song kicks into a double-time stomp-clap finish that pushes the energy even further.
It’s a song built to be sung along with rather than sat and studied, summed up well in its own line: “Cuz I’ll keep diggin’ with ma backbone kickin’. Hell, they can’t put me down.” There’s a playfulness running underneath the perseverance theme that keeps “Backbone” from ever feeling like a motivational speech, and with a groove this locked in carrying it, the song earns its pick-me-up intentions without having to work too hard to get there.
