Fortunate Suns: New Ground in a Familiar Land
In the far-off dystopian year of 2025, we find ourselves in an often misinterpreted conundrum. The common belief is that there is no new music being made today—everything you hear is a cheap imitation of something long expired. As someone who spends his days deep in the trenches of new releases, I have seen firsthand that we are facing exactly the opposite issue. Sometime in the 2010s we witnessed a modern-day Cambrian explosion in the music scene, which has left us wading through a sea of hot, new experimental genres while we wait on the corresponding mass extinction.
This can be too much for many people to follow. In previous generations, we saw a clear evolution in popular music—jazz became blues, blues became rock, rock became punk, and punk became alternative. Today, however, genres have split off into so many other subgenres that they are hard to follow if you didn't witness the mutations for yourself on social media. Ask the average old head in a guitar shop how we got dreamcore slow industrial shoegaze from garage rock and they would go so red that they wouldn't be able to hear themselves mangle the greatest riffs of 1992. Well, fear not, dear old head, for there are still new releases for you.
Fortunate Suns are the latest arrival in modern rock. Their debut EP, Last Train Out, has shot a jolt into a genre that nearly petered out near the end of the 2010s. Last Train Out expands on the sound that bands like Blackberry Smoke and The Band Feel have revitalized. The six-track EP hones the southern rock style while giving it a shot of psychedelic jam.
Fortunate Suns have found themselves in an odd place creating an album like this in 2025. Theirs is a specific subset of rock that peaked in the ‘70s and then, excluding some scattered outliers, didn't see another meaningful release until the late 2000s. It would have been hard enough to be one of those bands bringing the classic rock style back from the dead in ‘08, but now, almost two decades later, there's a whole new chapter in the genre overcrowding it. Classic rock has lived, died, been resurrected, gotten stale, and been given another fresh coat of paint. Now that we're stomping on new ground in a familiar land, we have to wonder, how do we keep the genre from becoming bland a third time? Well, I can tell you what we don't do: we don't all try to recreate the same album.
Fortunate Suns figured this one out, and so instead of taking another crack at doing The Black Crowes, as is becoming a startling trend in the genre, they took the framework built in the last few years and pumped in some Grateful Dead.
Last Train Out plays exactly like a jam band studio album. It's got heavy beats and noodling rhythms that beg to flow into one another. The eighteen-minute runtime slips by in a wave of rock ‘n’ roll showstoppers that could be played straight through in one continuous set with only a “Not Fade Away” here and a few bits of “Scarlet Begonias” peppered in there to help keep the jam loose.
Last Train Out opens with “Leaving Platform #10,” a testament to the hard rock roots that have inspired generations of musicians. From there it moves into “Hot Rod,” as pure an example of a jam as anything you would hear on a Phish record. The EP doubles down on the jams with “River,” which was originally released as a single back in February. “River” has a more mellow sound than the previous track; when I heard it for the first time, I could have sworn it was an Ekoostik Hookah tune. After that we get “Rain,” an instrumental interlude, a lost art in the modern day where albums are once again written around singles not to be listened to straight through. The EP's tempo creeps slowly back up over the course of the next track, “What Your Love (Been Doing to Me),” a psychedelic jam filled with experimental twists and turns, building up to the final gut punch, “Black Magic Mama," another hard rock tune that seemingly corresponds to “Leaving Platform #10,” closing the EP with the same thrashing energy that kicked it off.
Last Train Out is one of the most promising EPs I've heard this year. The winter months of 2025 were filled with unremarkable releases that failed to find a home on any of my playlists. Since its release in early April, however, I have had Last Train Out on repeat. It plays with its sound while remaining concise, exploring each song to see how far new wave classic rock can go without ever pushing things so far as to create a track that doesn't mesh with the rest of the record.
I was lucky enough to snag Fortunate Suns vocalist and guitarist Ty for a conversation about the EP. In our talk he mentioned one thing in particular that caught my attention, and if I may quote him directly, I think he says it best:
“It’s about creating songs that tell meaningful stories while leaving room for the music to evolve and grow in a live setting. We want to inspire connection—where the lyrics resonate, but the open spaces in the songs invite improvisation. It’s all about keeping things fresh and unpredictable—fun for us to play and exciting for the audience to experience. No two shows will be the same.”
In his statement, Ty perfectly captures not only the root of the cancer eating away at new wave classic rock but also what it is that separates Fortunate Suns from the ever-growing catalog of copycat bands packing the scene with regurgitated slop. It's not about recapturing a sound or a style; that was never what made rock ‘n’ roll great, despite what the Marc Bolans of the world may have you believe. No, rock ‘n’ roll is all about the energy, the live-free-die-young-leave-a-smoldering-trail-of-molten-hot-hits-in-your-wake lifestyle.
Fortunate Suns have this down to a science. Instead of blowing away time trying to nail the swagger and stage presence, they focused on writing meaningful songs that sound good to them. You can work at making your music sound like Bob Dylan's until you're blue in the face, but the fact of the matter is all you're going to end up with is a compilation of uninspired trash. There is a brutally clear dividing line between inspiration and imitation that the majority of new wave classic rock bands tend to stumble right over. Last Train Out, on the other hand, misses this pitfall, boldly showing off its inspirations while never flat out ripping them off.
As new wave classic rock becomes less new by the release, a startling trend is becoming clear: we did not learn our lesson in the 2010s. We watched Greta Van Fleet revive the genre and then drown in a sea of copycats while re-releasing the same album three times over. Well, the decade and genre have changed, but the song remains the same. I believe that as new wave classic rock takes flight again over the next few years, now with a southern rock twist, we will see dozens of bands pop up and die out doing nothing more than a cheap Allman Brothers impersonation with their careers. It's tempting to give up on the genre as a whole when you're staring down its death for a third time, but I'll be paying close attention. Fortunate Suns have proved to me that there are still gems mixed in with the bargain bin flops.
If you haven't had the chance yet, go listen to Last Train Out wherever you stream your music. I promise you that it will be the most valuable 18 minutes of your day. If you find yourself near Minnesota anytime soon, a detour to catch one of their shows would be well worth your time. If that's not in the cards for you, then you can join me in waiting for their first LP which will hopefully be coming out in 2026. Who knows? We may just luck out in the meantime and get one of those coveted jam band live albums to tide us over.