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.’”
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