When Luke Combs joined the Wilder Blue for a cover of Steve Young’s “Seven Bridges Road” in 2023, it kicked the Texas band up a notch in notoriety. “Our friends think we’ve blown up,” Zane Williams, the band’s frontman, says. Not quite: Williams is currently standing not in the front lounge of a tour bus but in the RV the group uses on the road.
But even if they didn’t really turn into overnight superstars, the impact of the collaboration, and the run of opening slots the Wilder Blue landed on Combs’ 2024 stadium tour, is tangible. “He personally leveled us up,” guitarist Paul Eason says of Combs’ stamp of approval. Now, the independent outfit can tour reliably from coast to coast, investing in itself when it’s time to record new music.
Just listen to Cinco, the Wilder Blue’s latest album, which dropped last month. In making the 10-track record, the band — Williams, Eason, multi-player Andy Rogers, drummer Lyndon Hughes, and bassist Sean Rodriguez — supplemented the five-part harmony that has become a signature with contributions from a series of A-list Texas musicians. There’s also another high-profile guest appearance in Nineties country hitmaker Tracy Byrd.
“We collaborated with a bunch of songwriters, and we had some new musicians in the studio. That’s all a new thing for us,” Rogers says.
After releasing seven solo albums in his native Lone Star State, the frontman Williams pulled a group of seasoned players together in 2019, forming what became the Wilder Blue. Cinco marks the group’s fifth studio album and first since 2025’s Still in the Runnin’. The band’s dedication to creating a consistent stream of fresh songs is a direct response to the dynamics of independent music at the moment, a time when fans often expect new albums annually from their artists.
“We pretty much try to create new music as a discipline — put it on the calendar and do it,” Williams says. “Keep our nose on the grindstone.”
With Hughes acting as the chief producer of Cinco, the group brought keyboardist Travis Bishop, steel guitarist Harrison Yount, and fiddle player Steve Auburn to the Sonic Ranch studio in Tornillo, Texas — not far from El Paso — to explore their musical range. “We went in there searching for some sounds that make us excited,” Williams says.
What they left with reflects that excitement. The Wilder Blue harmonies and Williams’ baritone twang are front and center, and it’s a country record, no doubt. But the band pushed boundaries throughout. “Sinners and Strays” is a high-tempo waltz and, on the surface, a tale of a ride through Mexican deserts — in reality it’s an autobiographical song about being “better together, whatever the weather.” Meanwhile, “Texas Women” takes a modern-country approach of spoken word and a percussion-heavy chorus, an ode to “Texas women and tight fittin’ jeans,” with vocals from Byrd. And a cover of Bruce Hauser’s 1978 tune “Wild Western Windblown Band” is decidedly bluegrass.
“I always thought it was up our alley,” Williams says of “Wild Western Windblown Band,” a song best-known through Reckless Kelly’s version on a 1997 live album. “I can hear the banjo part on it, and the harmonies are up front. And ‘Wild Western Windblown Band’ is kind of what we are. There’s parts where Paul could sing. There’s space for Andy to play. And at that arc in our recording session, we felt we needed an up-tempo song.”
But for all the rootsy sounds and organic songwriting on Cinco, the band admit that AI technology played a role, specifically AI music behemoth Suno. It’s the same company that Jason Isbell and a group of musicians sued just last week, alleging that Suno uses artists’ identities to train its AI. The Wilder Blue say they found value in Suno — not in writing or creating songs, but during the demo phase. The outside songwriters on the album had been using it to quickly render a song in different styles, from, say, Nineties country to bluegrass, folk to Southern rock. That tool helped Williams see the various directions he could take a song, once the band started recording it in the studio.
“You could basically take all of the unrecorded songs that we had in our bucket, and demo them 15 different ways,” Williams says. “Not everybody in this group is as comfortable with AI as I am, and that was part of the record. It’s part of the age-old dilemma — to demo or not to demo. Some producers don’t want to hear a demo. They want to start with a clean slate. Other people want to go into the studio and reproduce the demo. With Suno, you can have demos out the wazoo. I like that.”
Williams hopes the sonic advenuters on Cinco help convert casual listeners who came aboard after “Seven Bridges Road” into long-term fans, especially on the road.
“Our goal is to be able to draw five hundred to a thousand people nationwide, wherever we go,” Williams says. “That would be the level where we can really make a comfortable living. Maybe our wives don’t have to work. We could save for retirement, buy a house, those things. And we’re not gonna quit until we get to that point.”
The Wilder Blue’s Cinco Tour will take the band through the Midwest and Southwest in September and October before a stretch in California opening for Paul Cauthen in early November.
“I’m pumped up for people to be able to hear new music,” Hughes says. “We just had a show in Denver, and afterward we met a soldier, stationed in Iraq and doing operations in Syria. We met him randomly at a KOA camp, and he said that they’re blasting our music overseas. He said it’s helping them get through and makes them feel at home. Stories like that, they just make you feel like, OK, this is worth it.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose upcoming book, Sonoran Sounds, is set for release in March 2027 via Back Lounge Publishing.
