Clay Street Unit didn’t have any ambitions for fame. The six-piece group out of Denver just wanted a creative outlet to write and play songs. But five years since their inception, Clay Street Unit are taking folk music by storm. And the release of their debut album, Sin & Squalor, finally appeases a fan base that was clamoring for recorded music.
“We were kind of a community band,” Sam Walker, the band’s frontman and guitarist, says. “We sold out a bigger room, sold out a bigger room. We kept falling up. Next thing you know, we really had the right crew together to take on an album head-on.”
Clay Street Unit dropped Sin & Squalor last month via Leo33 Records, the independent Nashville label best-known as the home for Zach Top’s music. The 11-track project is a blend of bluegrass, folk, country, and rock, and was produced by Chris Pandolfi of the Infamous Stringdusters. It’s an album aimed at building upon the fanbase earned through their high-energy live show.
“I had written a couple of tunes that were just kind of living in my head and weren’t really fleshed out,” Walker tells Rolling Stone. “As members joined the band, the songs continued to evolve and take on a life of their own. It became a shift away from a really linear project of, ‘What do we want to put on an album?’ to ‘What are our favorite songs that we play together?’ We picked songs that we loved playing and the songs that the people seem to respond to.”
Currently, Clay Street Unit is Walker on guitar and vocals, mandolinist Scottie Bolin, pedal steel player Brad Larrison, drummer Brendan Lamb, bassist Jack Kotarba, and fiddle player Dan Andree. (Banjo player Jack Cline, a founding member featured on Sin & Squalor, left the group in late 2025.) Sin & Squalor showcases the band’s range of styles as well as the songwriting of both Walker and Bolin, including “Choctaw County,” a lyrical collaboration between both members that features guest vocals from Lindsay Lou.
“Scottie and I sat down one night in my basement and went, ‘We really need to write a pretty ballad,’” Walker says. “I grew up in Alabama, and Choctaw County is down there. I’d driven through it a million times. I loved the phrase ‘Choctaw County,’ and I wanted to write a song about it for a long time.”
Walker hails from Alabama, not far from Montgomery, and his grandmother, along with her six sisters, sang in the church choir. Growing up, Walker was in school chorus and in plays and musicals, but he recalls a lot of classic rock being played around the house. When he went off to college at the University of Alabama, he joined a jam band playing Widespread Panic and Phish covers, and, after graduation, moved to Denver, where he fell into an eclectic music community with a heavy folk bent.
“I found my way into bluegrass, and even the country music scene, backwards,” he says. “I grew up on all this awesome rock & roll, and then as I grew into being my own musician, it pivoted to being a more personal story. It was more string-oriented. But it wasn’t a straightforward path for me. Denver really opened my mind up to what was possible musically.”
Walker lived in a house on Clay Street on the west side of the city. A friend of a friend introduced him to Cline. One night, they decided to sit around and pick for fun — Cline on banjo and Walker on guitar. They had such a good time that Walker suggested booking a gig together as a duo. They started playing around Denver, picking up more members along the way, and eventually evolved into a six-piece folk outfit.
“It was like dominos falling. We’d play a gig and then meet somebody, and they would feel like the perfect fit, personality-wise,” Walker says.
The group found a welcoming stage at Cervantes, a venue in a culturally historic neighborhood near downtown called Five Points. They started on the patio, playing to fewer than a hundred people, eventually working their way up to the venue’s main room, which has a capacity of a thousand. In 2024, they opened for the Infamous Stringdusters at Mission Ballroom, which holds nearly 4,000. Last year, they played Red Rocks in support of Leftover Salmon.
Clay Street Unit earned a reputation in Denver for their live show, which followed them as they expanded their reach outside of Colorado. Their album release featured sold-out shows at the Basement East in Nashville and Terminal West in Atlanta, two mid-sized clubs known for hosting rising-star artists as they build fanbases.
“I think it was Andy Thorn from Leftover Salmon who said, ‘Life’s hard enough,’” Walker says. “People are spending their Friday or Saturday evenings with us, and it’s our job to come out there and have fun and make them know it’s OK to let loose and enjoy yourself. That’s how we approach it every night.”
Clay Street Unit, who made their Grand Ole Opry debut in February, are touring heavily this spring, with shows booked in well-known rock rooms. This summer, they’re on the lineup at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and have a date opening for Turnpike Troubadours in Jackson, Wyoming. A return to Red Rocks is in the cards, too — July 17 with the String Cheese Incident. Where they go next, Walker says, is up to Sin & Squalor: “It feels so good to finally get this record out in the world.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous will be released April 1 via Back Lounge Publishing.
