Music

The Droptines were used to playing simple dive bars and rock rooms. Their worldview changed this summer when they went on an amphitheater tour with Whiskey Myers.

By the time the Texas roots-rock band’s opening run for Whiskey Myers ended with a sold-out show in Nashville earlier this summer, the five-piece — named after a deer’s antler that, through genetics or injury, grows downward — nearly had whiplash over how far they had come.

“It feels like an acid trip,” Conner Arthur, the band’s singer, tells Rolling Stone. “There will be a lot to unpack after it’s all done. I need to start journaling, because I feel like I’ve forgotten a lot already.”

The Droptines are Arthur, bassist Dillon Sampson, drummer Johnny Sheets, pedal steel player Tony Rincon, and guitarist Donny Parkinson. Collectively, they are a group of veteran musicians from the Texas Hill Country, heavy on Texas and Red Dirt, with a wildly prolific catalog they are hell-bent on sharing at every concert.

“If you look at our setlist, there’s a shitload of songs on there,” Arthur says. “We’re not dragging out a song that should be three minutes and making it nine minutes, relying on every lick our guitar player has. We punch in, and we punch out. We’re trying to sell the songs.”

A native of Concan, Texas, Arthur grew up “at the foot of the state” at House Pasture Co., a major venue in the Texas music scene, run by Arthur’s parents. He started taking music seriously as a teenager, leaving home at 18 and busking around the country for the better part of a year. He formed the Droptines in 2019 and released an EP, but the pandemic shelved any real growth until 2021.

The first few years of the band were “filled with dumb shit” as Arthur recalls now. The band took nearly any gig it was offered, even when travel costs outweighed the pay. Their approach, he says, was grassroots, aiming to win over fans one-by-one. The first place he recalls it taking hold was in Lubbock, Texas. The band celebrated the release of a single, “Bill of Sale,” at the Blue Light — a music room on Buddy Holly Ave. — in 2023, and were greeted with a full house.

“The biggest chapter turn was in Lubbock,” Arthur recalls. “We walked in the damn door and it was sold out. That’s when I went, ‘God almighty, this is working.’ People started paying attention after they saw that.”

“Bill of Sale” made it onto the band’s self-titled 2024 album, one which raised the group’s profile significantly. Once impressive shows — such as an afternoon set at the 2024 Jackalope Jamboree in Pendleton, Oregon, to an overflow crowd — became routine. This year, the group landed a slot at Bonnaroo as well as a pair of afterparties at Lollapalooza (one with Luke Combs and one with Wyatt Flores), plus runs with Dwight Yoakam and American Aquarium.

The Lollapalooza show, the group says, was apparently manifested by the guitarist Parkinson.

“We got the news we were gonna play Lollapalooza, and Donny was still asleep,” Sampson says. “I go upstairs, and I wake him up and say, ‘Donny! We’re gonna play Lollapalooza!’ and he opens his eyes and says, ‘I always knew I’d play Lollapalooza,’ and rolls back over and goes back to sleep.”

Such confidence did not extend across the group. Ahead of their show at Nashville’s Ascend Amphitheater, Arthur admitted he wasn’t “used to this type of shit.” Success, he said, felt “like I stole something.” In the wake of the Droptines’ self-titled record, the calls from record labels began. Major outfits like Warner Records felt too big, but when representatives from Big Loud Texas showed up to a bar show in College Station, the group found its match.

Big Loud Texas was co-founded by Miranda Lambert and Jon Randall in 2023, and, a year later, the imprint named Brendon Anthony, then director of the Texas Music Office, as vice-president. Immediately, Anthony and Randall realized they both had the Droptines on their radars.

“Conner is a special songwriter and frontman,” Anthony tells Rolling Stone. “That comes across to me on the releases and onstage. His mind and interests and talents — beyond music as well — are so unique. The band behind him is tightly in tune and gets more locked in as they tour.”

The group announced their signing by the label at their Nashville show, which coincided with the release of the single “Take Too Much.” The song combines love at first sight, drugs, and death. Arthur’s initial delivery of, “I met a girl and it’s too soon to talk about her,” over heavy electric guitar, is a chilling tone-setter.

At the end of September, the Droptines released the follow-up “Calling All Cars,” a cover of a Mike McClure (The Great Divide) song about an alcohol-fueled fatal car crash and its impact on the first responders. The group will spend the rest of 2025 alternating between a headlining tour of theaters, along with more of those high-profile opening slots, including dates with the Turnpike Troubadours, plus another show with Whiskey Myers at the rockers’ annual Moon Crush festival in Miramar Beach, Florida, on Nov. 7.

For the Droptines, it’s all the result of their on-the-grind mentality.

“Hard work is hard for a reason. I’m not mad at anybody who went from TikTok to a tour bus right away,” Arthur says, “but I feel like what we’re doing has a little bit more dignity.”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose latest books, Never Say Never and Red Dirt Unplugged are available via Back Lounge Publishing.