Dexter And The Moonrocks Close Out 2024 As Their Biggest Year Yet
Photo credit: Michael Herrick
#1 ALTERNATIVE RADIO HIT, TRENDING TYLER CHILDERS COVER AND NEW 2025 DATES ANNOUNCED TODAY
December 2, 2024: Abilene, TX’s Dexter and The Moonrocks’ Cinderella story continued its unlikely trajectory this week. The small-town Texas alt rock band who perform “sad cowboy songs” found themselves at the top of the Alternative Radio chart with “Sad in Carolina;” scoring more than two million streams in two weeks and averaging 100,000 streams/day on their cover of Tyler Childers’ “Messed Up Kid;” and announcing their first series of tour dates in 2025.
“Sad in Carolina,” the band’s debut radio single from their EP “Western Space Grunge” (Severance Records/Big Loud Rock), has steadily ascended to the top of the alternative rock radio chart. This week, it surpassed Sum 41 to become the #1 song at the format.
As “Sad in Carolina” climbed to the peak spot at radio, the band, who themselves are fans of GRAMMY-winning country/folk artist Tyler Childers, shared a live recording of his b-side “Messed Up Kid,” which struck a chord: the cover was streamed nearly 800,000 times in the first week, now surpassing two million streams. On TikTok, fans have used the sound more than 1,000 times per day in the first 2 weeks of its release. Whiskey Riff said of the song, “Tyler Childers’ ‘Messed Up Kid’ was destined to be a rock song, & Dexter and The Moonrocks proved it.”
Carrying that momentum into the New Year, today the band revealed 2025 tour dates spanning the Southern US, kicking off February 7 at Austin, TX’s iconic venue Emo’s and running through March 1 at Oxford, MS’s The Lyric. A full list of dates is below, and tickets are on-sale this Thursday, December 5 at https://www.dexterandthemoonrocks.com/tour.
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A fry cook, an oil field operator, a concrete surface decorator and a kids’ baseball coach met up in West Texas and morphed a formerly country/western band into a flavor of alt rock only possible from small town Texas. Dexter and The Moonrocks make Western Space Grunge music, and their specific niche of “sad cowboy songs” has struck a nerve: in just two short years, Dexter and The Moonrocks gained more than 50 million streams (now 65 million) and 700,000 followers on TikTok.
That rise led to Severance Records, an imprint of Big Loud Rock, naming the band as their inaugural signing.
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