Drive-By Truckers, photo by David Wilds (courtesy of New West Records)

Every Friday, Relix surveys the wealth of new music released over the past seven days and selects dozens of standouts for the Relix Staff Picks playlist. Read on for the highlights from this week’s batch.

Drive-By Truckers’ 2003 album Decoration Day is held in higher esteem now than ever before. The Southern-rock revolutionaries’ fourth release, and first with Jason Isbell, matched their heavy, deep-rooted slant on alt-country by reimagining their regional mythology; through stark stories of desire and deceit, they crystallized a style that would fray the genre’s edges for decades to come. To honor that immortal moment, and their rising profile among artists and fans of the next generation, the band looked back today with The Definitive Decoration Day.

“Considered by many (including me) to be DBT’s masterpiece, this is the ultimate version of Decoration Day, sounding better than ever,” Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood said in a release.  

The Definitive Decoration Day pairs the original 18-track album, remixed and remastered by engineer Greg Calbi, with Heathens Live at Flicker Bar, Athens, GA – June 20, 2002, a previously unreleased double live album. Cut at a hometown acoustic show just weeks after the sessions that would become Decoration Day, the unearthed second disc is a record of the outfit on the verge of a breakthrough, pouring restless energy into a rowdy and harrowing three-guitar attack at a 75-cap bar.

“We decided that it would be fun to go play an acoustic late-night show at the tiny Flicker Bar, less than a block away from our beloved 40 Watt Club,” Hood reflected. “We ended up playing a set that included all but one song off of our new, but still unfinished album. I didn’t even know until recently that there was an existing tape of the show. This is a beautiful document of our band at a very crucial and joyous moment in time. I’m so happy that it exists.”

“The legacy of the band has definitely grown, and there’s a new appreciation for the Truckers and especially for that era of Decoration Day,” said Isbell, who will perform with the band for the first time in 18 years in December. “Without them, you wouldn’t have the kind of work being done by MJ Lenderman and Wednesday and Waxahatchee and a bunch of other acts. I can hear the Truckers in all that music.”

It’s a great day for new music, too. The Avett Brothers and Mike Patton’s unlikely collaboration, AVTT/PTTN, has the best of both worlds; the intersection between the sonic perspectives of the indie-Americana powerhouse and the iconic Mr. Bungle/Faith No More frontman is sometimes delicate and close, sometimes dark and grandiose, and always way out there. “My peculiar challenge in this was to become a long distant cousin,” Patton riffed in a tour announcement. “A brother that was orphaned. Maybe they kept him in the chicken coop or some shit. They brought him out years and years later.”

Saskatchewan’s plain-to-see-plainsman Colter Wall and the enigmatic Orville Peck have powerful albums out today (Memories and Empties and Appaloosa) that prove country’s resilience lies in its interpretability. Where Wall draws on the stripped-down folk and early outlaw country of the ’60s, Peck embraces inspiration from a more theatrical ‘70s Nashville sound, and both fashion their foundations into authentic and innovative personal styles.

Elsewhere, there’s Amsterdam-based Indonesian psych-folk-funk ensemble Nusantara Beat, who exploded into the world today with an exhilarating self-titled debut. Australian experimentalists GODTET have continued to define themselves as a force in improvisatory instrumental music with a new album accompanied by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Bill Callahan unveiled My Days of 58 on Tuesday with the apprehensive and lived-in lead single “The Man I’m Supposed to Be.” Grammy-winning trombonist Kalia Vandever’s Another View finds moments of transcendent clarity in lamenting spirals, traced by a new quartet with drummer Kayvon Gordon, bassist Kanoa Mendenhall and guitarist Mary Halvorson. Tony Molina translates the intensity of his hardcore roots into unflinchingly intimate ’60s-style folk rock with On This Day, a transportive 22-minute cycle of 21 sweet and scattered home recordings.

This week’s batch of Relix Staff Picks also includes new music from Nightmares on Wax, Soulive, Jake Xerxes Fussell and James Elkington, 13th Ward Social Club with Marco Benevento, Wendy Eisenberg, Aimee Mann, Robert Lester Folsom, Thee Headcoats (and Thee Headcoatees), The Gnomes, The Westerlies, The Far Sound, The Bros. Landreth, Tiberius, cosmic collective, Smirk and Dina Ögon, among many other gems. Tune in here.