Desert Grunge Meets Western Space Grunge

Avery Anna, the ACM’s reigning New Female Artist of the Year, trades verses with James Tuffs on track four of Dexter and The Moonrocks’ debut album.

Fox, as drummer Ryan Fox is known to just about everyone, was already a fan. The Dexter and The Moonrocks drummer, whose feel for internet culture the band’s label president has credited for the worldwide spread of “Freakin’ Out,” had been following Avery Anna before the two ever spoke. When they finally traded messages on social media, he found she had already posted a few TikToks set to that same song. He asked her to sing on a new track called “Why Don’t You Say So,” and according to what Fox told Billboard last month, her part was finished within 72 hours.

Signal. What happened: Dexter and The Moonrocks rel their debut album, with Avery Anna feat on its fourth track. Exact object: “Why Don’t You Say So” (feat. Avery Anna), a duet between Anna and frontman James Tuffs, track four of fourteen on Friends That I Don’t Like. When and where: rel October 2, 2026, across major streaming services via Severance Records and Big Loud Rock. Source: the album’s official track list, which the band revealed through Billboard in September, alongside the band’s own release announcements. Why it matters: the reigning ACM New Female Artist of the Year putting her voice on a rock band’s debut shows how freely artists are now crossing between Nashville and the current rock revival.

The conversation that got them there was mostly about taste. Anna told Fox she loved dad rock, naming Limp Bizkit among her favorites, and he liked the thought of the two of them “almost corrupting the country space” from opposite ends of it. The band leaned into the joke in the run-up to release, promising on Instagram that the song would bring back the divorced-dad rock of the 2000s and pitching it on TikTok as 2000s dad rock tangled up with grunge.

Friends That I Don’t Like is out on Severance Records, the Big Loud offshoot that made the band its flagship signing in 2023. Most of its fourteen songs were written in May and recorded across June and July, a fast turnaround that followed “Freakin’ Out” from TikTok virality to No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart, a No. 33 peak on the Hot 100 and a Platinum certification. That single is here, along with “If You Could Talk,” “It’s A Lot” and “12 Steps,” the May collide with fellow Texans Treaty Oak Revival, who are the record’s only other guests.

shock

Anna was born Avery Anna Rhoton in Flagstaff, Arizona, and found her first audience posting covers online, some recorded in a bathtub for the acoustics, before signing with Warner Music Nashville in 2022 at 18. Her catalog since has run confessional: the Gold-certified “Narcissist,” the 2025 album Let Go Letters, built from letters fans mailed her, and the Forgive, Forget EP in March. “Indigo,” her Platinum duet with Sam Barber, reached the top ten of Hot Country Songs and carried her to a much wider audience.

In April the Academy of Country Music named her New Female Artist of the Year, with Barber delivering the news onstage at the Lone Star Smokeout in Arlington, Texas. Ahead of the May 17 ceremony in Las Vegas, she summed up her awards-night look in a phrase that now reads like a preview: “desert grunge.” Her cover of Ozzy Osbourne’s “No More Tears” and her own “Blood Runs Thicker” had already shown she could carry a heavier song, and this time she does it as the guest on a rock band’s first full-length.

verd

Dexter and The Moonrocks have spent five years declining to settle genre questions for anyone. The four-piece of Tuffs, cousins Ryan and Ty Anderson, and Fox comes from rural Throckmorton County, roughly 70 miles northeast of Abilene, the city most coverage lists as home. They call what they play Western space grunge, and in announcing the album Fox said they had long managed to annoy honky-tonk crowds and old-school metalheads alike, and had simply stopped caring.

The record arrives in the middle of the band’s longest run of dates yet. Their theater and festival tour across the United States, Canada and Australia began September 24, takes in their first Australian shows this month, and continues into February 2027.