On Fort Defiance, Erik Vincent Huey steps beyond the shadowed hollows he mapped on his solo debut and opens the lens wider. The album follows 2023’s Appalachian Gothic, but trades its tight narrative focus for a road-ready collection of songs shaped by movement, memory, and the pull between home and elsewhere.

Huey’s story is inseparable from the terrain that raised him. A son of four generations of coal miners, he grew up along the Monongahela River in West Virginia and western Pennsylvania, absorbing punk urgency from the Clash, X, and the Sex Pistols, while never fully shedding his Appalachian roots. The path wound through cowpunk touchstones like the Blasters, the Beat Farmers, Jason & the Scorchers, and Dwight Yoakam, before circling back to the formative voices of Johnny Cash and George Jones, first heard in the cab of his uncle’s 18-wheeler.

That same push and pull animates Fort Defiance. Huey has described the record as a bid for escape velocity, not a rejection of Appalachia but a reckoning with it, songs built to travel rather than stay put. The production reinforces that forward motion. Helmed by Eric “Roscoe” Ambel, the album balances grit and clarity, pairing lived-in roots with a punchy, band-forward feel. Guest vocal turns from Tommy Stinson and Sarah Borges add character without crowding the frame, while backing from Baltimore power-pop mainstays Starbelly gives the songs lift and momentum.

Huey’s broader profile has been shaped by his work as Cletus McCoy, fronting the Surreal McCoys, a long-running cowpunk outfit once dubbed a “hipster doofus band” by Mojo Nixon. With steady airplay for their mashup “Whole Lotta Folsom” on SiriusXM’s Outlaw Country, the band has built a loyal audience and millions of streams, a reminder that Huey’s songwriting has always lived comfortably at the intersection of punk attitude and country tradition.

If Appalachian Gothic introduced Huey as a writer deeply attuned to place, Fort Defiance shows him testing the borders. It is the sound of someone carrying home with him while seeing how far the songs can go, turning a personal journey into a set of tracks meant to move, collide, and keep rolling.