After covering songs by Ratt and Skid Row on last year’s Space Brain, the gritty singer-songwriter embraces the twang on Discount Country
Alex Williams turned heads back in 2017 with his outlaw country debut Better Than Myself. Since then, he’s been grinding it out on the road, and last year indulged a hair-metal side quest with Space Brain, an album of country-fied covers of Ratt, Poison, and Skid Row songs. It was a fun listen, with Williams shining a light on the strong songwriting behind a genre once dismissed as vacuous.
Now, however, the Indiana native is returning to the sounds that made him with Discount Country, a twangy, outlaw-leaning EP of five songs that drops on Friday. Rolling Stone premieres the rambling anthem “Time on His Hands” a day early. “There’s no room for the man in the rat race/when he’s got nothin’ but tie on his hand,” Williams sings in a smooth baritone.
Williams recorded Discount Country with producer Ben Fowler, revisiting songs he wrote shortly after the Space Brain sessions in 2024.
“I didn’t have a plan in mind when recording songs for this EP. Just pulled out 5 songs and they ended up fitting well together. The Discount Country title seemed fitting as it’s a collection of older country style songs I dug up,” he says in a statement. “Kind of a bargain bin tongue-in-cheek title.”
Williams goes back on the road later this month, playing headlining shows with an emphasis on his native Midwest — where he first discovered both outlaw country and those Eighties rock staples.
“I prefer more of the late Eighties bands with the blues-rock elements,” Williams told RS last year. “My dad had a wooden case of CDs in the basement, from Tesla to Skid Row to Faster Pussycat and I’d just look at the album covers. I was like, ‘These guys look like action figures.’”