This past February, rising jam-grass outfit Mountain Grass Unit were recording their latest album, Appalachian Smoke, at Sputnik Sound in Nashville. Sitting behind the mixing desk was Vance Powell, a master engineer who’s worked with Chris Stapleton,
Jack White, and Phish. Leaning back into the studio couch as Powell made his tweaks, guitarist Luke Black and mandolinist Drury Anderson began debating the use of an electric sitar in their song “Eagle’s Nest.”
Their inspiration for taking sonic chances lies in modern-day artists like Billy Strings and icons like Grateful Dead. “Bands that we grew up listening to, they always tried to go to different levels,” Anderson tells Rolling Stone.
The rest of the quartet, including bassist Sam Wilson and fiddler Josiah Nelson, grab a seat behind Powell and let the tune play back once more. When it’s over, it’s decided that the sitar works just right. The group breaks for lunch and heads to a barbecue joint nearby, where they slide into a large booth and order baskets of smoked wings and meat platters. On the menu for discussion, fittingly? Appalachian Smoke, Mountain Grass Unit’s new album.
“It will definitely be the closest we have to maybe what a Mountain Grass Unit show would [sound] like in this current time,” Anderson says. “Because it feels more natural. It feels like we’re playing off each other. It’s a little bit more raw, a little more fluctuating in the tempos.”
According to Anderson, the theme for the Appalachian Smoke is one of homecoming and a yearning to return to nature, where “it’s generally about just going to the mountains, and how you can’t help but get back there every time.”
“When she opens up the sky she speaks through trees/A distant siren wails, begging to me,” Anderson sings on the title track. “Appalachian smoke, pulling me in/When the mountains call I start to fall in the lake of sin.”
“It feels fresh, like a new era for us,” Black says. “We’ve had time to sit together and write these new songs and bounce all these ideas we’ve had building up for a while.”
Sonically, MGU ride a razor-sharp line between traditional and progressive bluegrass, the same tightrope walk that acts like the Infamous Stringdusters and Strings find themselves on. It’s a path blazed by New Grass Revival and expanded by Leftover Salmon. There’s also a clear nod to the Tony Rice Unit. When it comes to vocal harmonies, MGU shift toward the vibe of the Country Gentlemen and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. And yet, there’s a unique approach and follow-through that’s solely MGU, with one key difference: the outfit doesn’t feature a banjo, the absence of which yields a wider melodic space for MGU to push into more contemporary realms of rock, country, and jam.
“Obviously, we were big into Billy when he first hit the scene, but a lot of our influence were local musicians [from Alabama],” Anderson says. “We love [Billy] dearly, but I think he’d be the first to tell you, ‘Don’t replicate me, do your own thing.’ And I think we try our best to not give people the impression that we’re just trying to be a Billy Strings rip-off, you know?”
Mountain Grass Unit are one of the hottest acts on the national festival circuit. Over the past two summers, they’ve made a name for themselves with an unrelenting schedule, whether it be at a bluegrass gathering, dusty Americana throwdown, or backwoods jam-band blowout. In method, it’s an incredibly talented ensemble of young pickers champing at the bit for whatever lies ahead. Anderson is 22, Black and Wilson both 23, with Nelson the oldest at 29 (his bandmates call him “Gramps”).
Anderson and Black began taking music lessons back in Birmingham, Alabama, when they were just children. “I don’t remember when I met [Luke], it’s been that long,” Anderson says. “Our parents were friends, so we learned our instruments and we’d occasionally get together and play.”
Anderson and Black come from families of bluegrass lovers, with Anderson’s father one of the faces behind the Acoustic Cafe, an annual bash in Hayden, Alabama. Started in 1996, the festival ran for 20 years and featured bluegrass greats like Tony Rice, John Hartford, and Doc Watson. One of the acts that made a big impression on the youngsters was the Allen Tolbert Unit, whose namesake would captivate them by buzzing up and down his guitar fretboard like a hummingbird in flight.
“Allen took Luke into his arms and taught him everything he absolutely knows, and I ended up taking mandolin lessons from him because he’s fantastic,” Anderson says. “And that’s when Mountain Grass started, when we reconnected with bluegrass and got onto the Allen Tolbert train.”
By middle school, Anderson and Black formed an acoustic duo, Andblack, that performed at restaurants and birthday parties around Birmingham, including an appearance at the final Acoustic Cafe gathering in 2016. At the same time, Black started teaching Wilson bass. The trio eventually ended up playing together for the first time in a short-lived teenage rock band called Rug Monkey. They also put together a jazz/funk project for a hot minute.
“Then we decided, ‘Let’s go back to bluegrass,’” Anderson recalls. In 2018, Mountain Grass Unit were formed. Anderson was 15, Black and Wilson now 16. Once Black got his driver’s license, it was on, with MGU burning up the highways and backroads of Alabama, jumping on any stage that’d hire them.
“Literally any gig we could get, we’d take — 50th birthday parties, lake parties, high schools,” Anderson says. “Right when we got Mountain Grass going to where we felt we were getting some solid gigs every weekend is right when Covid hit. Instead of hanging it up, we decided to get on Facebook and do a bunch of live streams.”
The band set up a stage in Anderson’s basement and did regular live broadcasts, jamming out new material or Strings and Grateful Dead covers. They linked a virtual tip jar and started making a good chunk of change. But, more importantly, they began to grow a fanbase. After the pandemic, the members of MGU also went to college. Black attended Berklee School of Music in Boston, Wilson entered the University of Alabama. A year later, Anderson would join Black at Berklee. While being full-time students, they’d fly out and tour each weekend, then hit the road all summer. By 2024, Nelson came onboard.
“[During] my last semester, I took 26 credits so I could graduate with these guys a year early,” Anderson says. “And hit the road immediately. I got home, packed up my bags and left.”
But if there was a moment where it became clear that MGU were garnering national attention, it was the 2025 Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Besides playing the main stage, the real litmus test of MGU’s trajectory was an afternoon set on the Elks Park stage tucked away in downtown Telluride. When MGU got behind the microphone, a sea of people flooded the small park. It was obvious something was happening.
“[Telluride] has been this electric feeling of having people receive your music, and receive it well,” Anderson tells Rolling Stone. “One of the coolest things is to be here and share that experience with basically our heroes.”
Just four days after Telluride, MGU made their debut at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. From there, they played for the Bonnaroo faithful, opened for country star Dierks Bentley, and made their Grand Ole Opry debut as a guest of Del McCoury, before selling out their album release show at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl.
MGU also guested on Shania Twain’s new album, Little Miss Twain. The country megastar invited them to her home studio in the Bahamas, where they recorded her songs “Right Time” and “Dirty Rosie” with Twain. Between takes, they’d hang out and get to know one another, with Twain eating breakfast with MGU before heading into the studio to work. It was a surreal experience for the young ensemble.
“It was really crazy that we actually got to work with her,” Anderson says of Twain. “She’d do a scratch vocal, then we’d play over it, then she’d go back over it and do another take.”
This past July, at the Under the Big Sky festival in Whitefish, Montana, MGU did three shows over the weekend, playing both festival stages and a late-night showcase at the Remington Bar in downtown Whitefish.
At UTBS, Black was asked why bluegrass is expanding into the mainstream. He pointed to a pushback against digital technology and accelerated modernity, where the ancient bluegrass combination of wood, wire, and wisdom fosters organic connectivity between humans.
“There’s this boom in AI, [where] everything is so predictable and generated,” Black tells Rolling Stone. “And bluegrass is the opposite — it’s so raw and broken down, just strict playing and improvising.”
Earlier this month, at the Earl Scruggs Music Festival in Western North Carolina, MGU rolled through an hour-long set of new material from Appalachian Smoke and intricate improvisational jams. But they also worked in an unexpected cover: AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll).”
“We never sat there and said, ‘This is too much, I can’t do it anymore,’” Anderson says of the rigors of touring, the kind Bon Scott sang about in the AC/DC classic. “We just had our eyes on the prize.”
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