After four years of winding down their touring schedule, Reckless Kelly is making one final move: reclaiming the songs that made them known.
The Idaho-turned-Austin rockers announced their road retirement in 2022, scaling down from 180+ shows a year to eight gigs booked for the rest of 2026. Frontman Willy Braun says the band is having fun again. "It's a lot more fun to look forward to every show now," he says. "We had been to the point where, a lot of nights, we were just trying to get through it. Now, we're genuinely having a really great time playing."
But retiring from the road does not mean retiring from the studio. According to Rolling Stone, Reckless Kelly has begun rerecording tracks from their mid-2000s Sugar Hill and Yep Roc catalog, a strategy borrowed from Taylor Swift and John Fogerty.
The band released Alternate Routes in May, a double EP featuring 12 reimagined cuts from that era, including live staples "Ragged as the Road," "Seven Nights in Eire," and "Wicked Twisted Road."
"It was mainly songs that we didn't own," co-founder Cody Braun explains. The brother of Willy, Cody describes the frustration of trying to re-release records only to be blocked by labels that no longer have rights or interest. "You chase it down and say, 'We want to do this,' and they say, 'We have no money or time to spend on this thing.' This lets us reclaim those songs again."
Reckless Kelly refused major-label deals that would have softened their heavy rock edge. They built a following across Texas in the pre-streaming era, a scene that also launched Pat Green, Charlie Robison, and Cross Canadian Ragweed. Their signature albums, 2003's Under the Table & Above the Sun and 2005's Wicked Twisted Road, remain touchstones of Texas rock.
With Last Frontier (2024) proving they still have creative energy, and full ownership of their back catalog within reach, Reckless Kelly's version of retirement is a second act.
