A unit is a standard of measure or a cohesive thing that’s also part of something larger, and that sounds like a good metaphor for a band. Of late, “units” are popping off in roots music. The most famous is Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit, but coming up fast are progressive string bands Mountain Grass Unit from Alabama and Denver’s Clay Street Unit. And in the case of the latter two, the inspiration is clear. From the late 1970s through the 1990s, the Tony Rice Unit (Tony seems to have coined the unit band concept) was a rotating cast of acoustic virtuosos pioneering what the late, great guitar player Rice called “spacegrass.” That unit changed many lives, including my own.
Clay Street Unit’s Sam Walker says he and his banjo playing friend Jack Cline were mutually obsessed with the Tony Rice Unit’s legendary 1979 album Manzanita when they started playing together. “It started as a duo. There's six of us now, so we filled it out into a unit, thank goodness,” Walker tells WMOT in the conversation above. “I don't think the band would have started if Jack and I hadn't really listened to that record and bonded over it.”
Newgrass is a flavor in the CSU sound, but not the main ingredient. You could file them as indie-folk, southern rock, or even singer-songwriter with a jam friendly rhythm section. They’ve spent the past three years recruiting fans from the crowds that love 49 Winchester, Red Clay Strays, Tyler Childers and Billy Strings. And they had a particularly stellar 2025 on the road, setting up an effective launch for their first full-length album Sin & Squalor, which landed on Feb. 13 and which debuted on the Americana album chart last week at an impressive number eight.
The release was supposed to arrive a lot sooner, but this young band has now already had a character-building run-in with the major label record sector. They were signed to Monument, a historic Nashville label that was revived in 2017 as a subsidiary of Sony. After an undistinguished eight-year run, the label abruptly shuttered last April just when Clay Street was set to go with Sin & Squalor. Fortunately for them, it took just a few months to find a new home in Leo33, the indie outfit that’s behind the breakout star and Best Traditional Country Album Grammy winner Zach Top.
Produced by Infamous Stringdusters banjo player Chris Pandolfi, the album evokes jeans-and-flannel levels of comfort and the call of western highways, with the relatably soulful voice of Sam Walker out front. The woozy guitars-and-chill song “Let’s Get Stoned” is reaching people. Also adding spins to the streaming odometer, “Drive” is about the opposite - being too far from a lover for the sake of the band.
The songs, written by Walker and mandolinist Scottie Bolin (also in on this conversation), aren’t breaking any new topical or compositional ground, but their stories of the road, hard times, love and perseverance sit easily on the ears and become showcases for quality singing and picking, if not the kinds of mega-jams one expects from their state brethren Leftover Salmon or Yonder Mountain String Band. At least not yet. The lure of the jam has black-hole level gravity in Colorado.
“We were, you know, a little by the book. Parts were very defined, two, three, four, years ago,” says Walker. “We got to the jam section of (a) song, and everyone just kind of looked at each other and started laughing! You have to fall on your face and make things uncomfortable before you get comfortable with that. The biggest thing is just hitting the road and doing it over and over.”
For Bolin, inviting friends on stage has been a good entree to deep improvisation. “Another thing we love to do is to have sit-ins and guests play with us whenever, whenever possible,” he says. Songs like “One Last Time,” one of the stretchiest on the album, are good for that “because it changes night to night. So we might as well have that new influence on stage and see where it goes.”
It’s surprising, given all this hippie improv talk, that Clay Street Unit was born as a connection between a guitarist/songwriter (Walker) and the banjo playing Jack Cline in 2021. It’s hard to go too crazy with that configuration, so they found drummer Brendan Lamb and pedal steel player Brad Larisson. Then at a gig they made friends with a band called Morsel, and that’s where Bolin and bass player Jack Kotarba came from. “At its core, it is just a group of guys that really get along, and we're really just friends first,” Bolin says. “And I don't think we took this as our long-term career path initially. We didn't really foresee touring on the road full time at first, but it's kind of become that.”
And the road has treated them well. John Laird, publisher of the Americana On Stage newsletter and leader of the Americana Agency, says Clay Street Unit has been headlining 500-capacity clubs around the country, including recent sold out shows at Terminal West in Atlanta and Nashville’s Basement East. They debuted in February on the Grand Ole Opry. And they’ve got a major run of festivals set for this year, including Winter Wondergrass, Telluride Bluegrass, and Bristol Rhythm & Roots. “Not many bands ever do that, no matter how long they have been touring,” Laird told me.
The rarely heard country rock blend of pedal steel and banjo is one of the signature sounds on Sin & Squalor. But not so going forward. We learn late in this conversation that banjo player Cline recently stepped away and off the road after getting married. “Our next chapter, we’re bringing a fiddle on” in the person of Dan Andree, says Walker. “We kind of see ourselves as a Venn diagram where folk meets country meets bluegrass. I guess that's why they came up with the term Americana. Fiddle, we felt, was (right) for where we were trying to go. We didn't want to lean too far into the bluegrass world. We wanted to be able to be versatile and what the song called for and not what the genre called for.”
Bands built in Colorado have a strong track record upon venturing out of state, and CSU has certainly vaulted itself into the Bands To Watch In 2026 category. It helps to have Pandolfi of the Stringdusters in their corner, and I reached out to him about getting to know the sextet. “I've worked with a lot of young bands, and spent 20 years in my own band, and these guys have something special,” he told me by email. “They are more than the sum of the parts, as musicians and as humans. They write great songs and play their instruments in a complementary way that sounds musical and experienced. And it certainly doesn't hurt that their front man, Sam Walker, has one of the best voices I've ever heard. These guys have a very bright future.”
