Have you ever had a moment when the first few bars of a song from a band you’ve never heard skips your ears and goes straight to the heart?
That happened to me a couple years back when I first ran into Silverada and ever since I’ve been shocked that they haven’t become more well known to the general public.
Formed in 2007 by frontman Mike Harmeier, Silverada (named Mike and the Moonpies until earlier this year) has quietly put out one of the most rock-solid catalogues of any act in recent memory, but their 7 studio LPs tell only part of their story.
Silverada is a group of grinders, old-school bar musicians that embrace the role of “road dogs” and Harmeier leads that charge. He started out playing covers in any Austin bar that would have him, a mentality that was proudly carried by the group since they formed, playing upwards of 150 shows every year to slowly build a fanbase through the tried and true, though not en vogue, method of getting asses in seats and seeing if you’ve got enough. No frills, no algorithms, just country music, cold beer, and neon lights, as cliche as that sounds.
For the first 17 years, they went by Mike and the Moonpies, a moniker that Harmeir wasn’t too fond of from the start. He told Garden & Gun that he quickly came up with the name before heading to a recording studio for the first time:
“The alliteration was funny to me; we were drinking a lot and just having fun. I had no expectations, so it didn’t seem that important.”
He went on to say he’d tossed around the idea of changing the name for years but finally pulled the trigger in January of 2024 in the lead up to their latest record, the newly self-titled Silverada.
Obviously, any artist or band’s sound is going to evolve over time and they decided to not be boxed in by expectations of the past. The time to make a change was now, bass player Omar Oyoque said to Rolling Stone:
“It provided a really nice platform for a clean slate. Before, everybody was writing about, and some still do, the Texas barroom honky-tonk. But there’s more to us than that. Hell yeah, we can sit and crush a 90 minute set of honky-tonk bangers because that is where we come from. But where we come from, while it’s part of who we are, it’s not entirely who we are. So this album is a nice clean slate.“
True to their word, Silverada featured some new sounds and a southern rock influence that had been there all along, but was certainly less pronounced. Fans may were worried about the band changing, especially since so many adored the original name and were obsessed with the sound, and we were all relieved and left wondering why we worried when we heard the final project, which was a clean, crisp, solidly country album that will hold up regardless of how much time passes.
Silverada remains a sort of anomaly in country music. If you meet one of their fans you’ll quickly see just how passionate they are about the group and pretty much every listener in the independent country scene knows and likes their music, but they seem to somehow be running up against some sort of glass ceiling and I just don’t understand why. So many songs of theirs would actually do well at country radio if given the chance (not saying you need radio to be successful, etc, etc…) and their music is easily accessible to casual country music fans, so what gives? I think I may take the promotion of Silverada as my life’s mission from here on out…
If you’ve been sleeping on these guys, go check out their previous work (I’ll add in a few must listens at the bottom) but be sure to look them up this Friday because they’ve got a new single coming out.
Titled “The Road”, it will be the first music they release since their “clean slate” album and will feature Rob Leines, a modern outlaw type with a heavy southern rock influence and country roots. If you’re not familiar, we’ve been telling you to get onboard with Rob for a while now.
I can’t find any live performances of this song on the internet to it’s going to be a complete surprise to us all, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned from Silverada over the years, it’s to just trust them not to disappoint.
‘The Road’ a new song by Silverada and Rob Leines is out this Friday!
Photo: Mike Sarazin pic.twitter.com/gxLBMtZCZf
— Silverada (@silveradamusic) November 18, 2024
I’m pumped up for Friday and hope you are too because Silverada deserves so much more than they have.
If you’re ready to do a deep dive, let me get you started with a few staples: