By Joseph Hudak,Josh Crutchmer
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September 17, 2025
Briscoe are a Texas folk-rock duo that address topics as wide-ranging as marriage and border crossings on new album ‘Heat of July.’
Justin Cook*
Ever try writing an album in a van? Ask Briscoe about that. The rising folk-rock band from Austin established itself as a surefire sellout in the honky-tonk scene of the Texas Hill Country, before landing high-profile tours with Noah Kahan and Dave Matthews Band. While navigating all of that quick-paced travel, they also made a record.
“I think you can feel the fact that a lot of these songs were written in a moving vehicle,” says Philip Lupton, who fronts Briscoe alongside Truett Heintzelman. He’s talking about Heat of July, Briscoe’s second studio album, a 12-track collection of tracks born on the road, which drops on Friday. “Saving Grace,” an album highlight, is out now as a single with an accompanying video.
Back in late August, Lupton and Heintzelman caught their breaths after soundcheck at Sagebrush, the venerable dancehall on the far south side of Austin. A few hours later, they would take the stage in front of a sold-out crowd of 400.
This is Briscoe’s home turf, where the banjo and saxophone they incorporate into their high-energy live show resonates effortlessly with fans who came to dance and those who came to scream and shout. Heat of July is as much about leaving a comfort zone as it is about seeing the world through a windshield — something the group will experience again in late October when they hit the West Coast for a long stretch.
“Part of being on the road, one of the really amazing aspects of driving around in a Ford Transit van, is that you really get to see everything,” Heintzelman says. “But at the same time, with as much as we were gone, it left a lot of time for reflection on being away from home.”
The idea of home is as important to Heat of July as the road-dogging that inspired it.
Lupton and Heintzelman are Texans — Lupton from San Angelo and Heintzelman from San Antonio. They met as teenagers at Laity Lodge Youth Camp, a Christian summer camp in the Hill Country, and began playing together. But it was while attending the University of Texas in Austin during the pandemic that they began to aggressively pursue gigs. They released an EP in 2020 and their debut album, West of It All, in 2023.
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For the most part, Heat of July is about their lives since, including marriages for both men. “That contributed to a lot of our songwriting,” Lupton says, “the maturing of those relationships.” Briscoe lay that theme bare in “Saving Grace,” an up-tempo love song that plays out over a banjo and snare drum before the hook of “I need your love most every day/You fly so high/You’re real as rain.”
But marriage is not the only relationship the two men explore on the record. “Roughnecks” was written about Heintzelman’s great-grandfather, who moved from Oklahoma to Texas to work in the oil fields in the early 20th century. And the LP’s crescendo comes via “Flashlights in the Canyon,” a haunting tune about a woman attempting to migrate to the United States, set along the Texas-Mexico border.
It’s a true story.
“It was inspired by a hunting trip that I took with some buddies down on the border in West Texas,” Lupton says. “We were on a 3,000-acre ranch outside of Nowhere, Texas, maybe ten miles from the Rio Grande. One night, one group went down to go hunting, and all of a sudden, they came flying back up to camp. They were yelling, ‘Flashlights in the canyon! Lock the trucks! Go inside!’ Obviously, it was people crossing illegally from Mexico.”
Lupton says that after hearing so much about border crossings on the news, to experience it in person offered a different perspective. “I ended up talking to a bunch of locals who lived down on the border. And I heard stories of people who had traveled 1,600 miles from Guatemala, on foot. It’s such a complicated issue, and what I wanted to do on the song was provide a little bit of context of humanity on both sides of the issue, without taking a stance on one side or the other,” he says. “It’s what I saw. Now, what do we do with that?”
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The result is a song that spins a narrative in the spirit of John Prine or Bob Dylan.
It’s no accident that both Lupton and Heintzelman cite Prine and Dylan — as well as Texas and Red Dirt storytellers Robert Earl Keen and Turnpike Troubadours — as influences. Throw in a love of late-Sixties rock, and Briscoe can be hard to pin down, with or without the sax onstage.
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“People often ask us what genre we consider ourselves,” Heintzelman says. “The answer we have landed on is ‘Texas folk rock.’ Growing up in Texas, we’re not a proper country band by any means. We’re a product of our environment. We love country music, but more than anything, we love songwriter-first music.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose latest books, Never Say Never and Red Dirt Unplugged are available via Back Lounge Publishing.
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