“Honestly, I never set about to write about what was going on. I just did,” says singer-songwriter Austin Lucas of his latest album, Alive in the Hot Zone.
Lucas wrote and recorded the album while thousands of miles away from his hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. As he quarantined with his partner in Germany, he felt a sense of guilt for not being with his Stateside comrades during this tumultuous year.
“I felt like I was not experiencing something that everyone else from the place that I am from was experiencing,” he says. “And that doesn’t mean that I have not been experiencing COVID-19 lockdown, and haven’t been experiencing terror, anxiety, and all that different stuff. But I was so far removed from everybody that I was close with that I felt like I was experiencing a thing separately.”
Stuck in an apartment during lockdown with nothing else to do, Lucas began working on the album that would become Alive in the Hot Zone.
“What do you do once you get tired of binge-watching Netflix?” he asks. “What’s the next step? Of course, pick up a guitar and start writing! There were weeks where I just had new songs constantly being pushed through.”
The album that came out the other side is a powerful collection of anti-fascist, alt-country anthems, inspired by the events of the past year. In particular, Lucas was inspired by the uprisings following the murder of George Floyd. He notes that movements like this often come from young people, who can spot injustice before their elder, more jaded counterparts.
“When you get to my age, you’re like, yeah, shit’s not fair,” he says. “Life’s fuckin’ unfair. But that’s so counterintuitive to anybody who wants to change the world and make it a better place. Because yes, the world is unfair. Does that mean it should stay that way? Fuck no!”
Outside of music, Lucas is also a Muay Thai coach, which may sound like a strange endeavor for an anti-fascist country artist, especially considering some of the stereotypes about martial arts culture. But when Lucas talks about the history of martial arts, it’s easy to connect the dots and see why he is drawn to both combat sports and working-class music.
“A lot of martial arts are delineated from peasants who couldn’t own weapons to fight against their oppressors,” he explains. “And who were their oppressors? Kings, various landowners, people who could afford to train troops, and have swords, and all sorts of other shit. Most of it comes from a need to equip the people with skills to fight back.”
As a country singer cut from the cloth of punk and hardcore, Lucas serves as a perfect example of the similarities between these genres.
“I think that all styles of music, for the most part, it’s possible to fuse them together in some sort of cohesive way,” he says. “But country music and punk, they both have similar roots. Their music is made by people, in their formation, who were outcasts getting shit on.”
Lucas’s music tells the stories of the oppressed and of the people fighting against oppression, which fits perfectly with both punk and country ethos. “I tell people that I’m a punk country musician,” he says. “And they’ll be like, ‘that must be really novel, nobody must be doing it.’ And I’m like, since the inception of punk, there have been cowpunks! There has been country punk. Punk as a musical, artistic vehicle, has room for everything. And honestly, so does country music.”
Photo courtesy of Austin Lucas
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