South Carolina Country-Rock Band Emerges

What on earth is a Winyah? For many, it’s a bay in South Carolina. But for a growing audience of indie-rock fans, it’s the name of their new favorite band.

Named after that very body of water — Winyah Bay — in their home state, the five-piece mixes hard-driving Southern rock with youthful folk stylings to join a rock-edged new wave of bands like Dexter and the Moonrocks, Fox N’ Vead, and Cigarettes at Sunset. Winyah first became an entity in 2023 and played Bonnaroo in 2024, before dropping their debut album, Lot to Learn, the following year. That gave rise to a tour that featured a Lollapalooza showcase and back-to-back sellouts at New York’s Bowery Ballroom. Now, Winyah’s challenge is to harness that momentum with their sophomore LP, Right Here, Right Now, which dropped in mid-September.

Right Here, Right Now is their second LP on Evan Honer’s Cloverdale Records label and features 11 tracks, nearly all of which were written on bass player Stephen Russell’s back porch in September 2025, when the group caught a break between tour dates.

“It’s the first body of work that we ever wrote all together,” frontman Thomas Rowland says. “We came out of it with some songs that we really liked, but it was crazy. You really do have your whole life to write the first album and then such a short time to write the second one. It was a learning experience. It was us figuring out how to write together, and we’re still learning.”

Winyah is Rowland, Russell, keyboardist Robert Buffington Jr., guitarist Luke Gordon, and drummer Jake Riley. They took root playing bars in beach and college towns across South Carolina, and, quite quickly, realized they were on to something. They wrote the songs that make up Lot to Learn to give themselves enough original material to fill a set and, 25 million streams later, are figuring out the rest on the fly.

“Soundchecks, a little bit,” Gordon says of how the band shapes its musical identity. “As time grew between writing the first album and the second album, we all started collectively really enjoying each other’s influences and getting into them a lot more than we were before. It blossomed into a song here and a song there, and it came together.”

Lyrically, Right Here, Right Now feels grounded in the band’s collective lives. “Lust” and “8 Missed Calls” both lament either romance or situationships, with the latter featuring the line, “I hate texts, their permanence/care too much, plays like disrespect/overthink and never respond.” Meanwhile, crash cymbals and electric guitar keep Rowland’s Carolina drawl from drifting too far into a folk sound. When he’s not fronting Winyah, Rowland lives in Nashville, working as a producer and collaborating with the likes of Liam St. John, Brendan Walter, and Leon Majcen.

But Winyah burst onto the scene as a predominantly rock band, and that’s how they plan to stay. A Winyah show is not a rowdy, beer-slinging concert like some of the groups to whom they’ll inevitably draw comparisons as it’s a spectacle of swaying fans and raised smartphones. At their Bowery Ballroom shows — the New York city gigs in May of this year that became the group’s benchmarks — Gordon crowd-surfed from the stage to the middle of the room and back, playing guitar the whole time.

Winyah has already opened for Honer, Mt. Joy, and Wilderado, picking and choosing elements of each act to help shape their own sets. In October, they toured Europe for the first time and will return to New York in November to play the 1,800-capacity Brooklyn Steel, more than twice the capacity of Bowery Ballroom. That show is already sold-out.

“We started very much as a live band,” Russell says. “When you talk around, you learn that’s now how everyone starts, but it felt so obvious and natural to us. That’s what being a band was — playing live shows before we even had music.”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose upcoming book, Sonoran Sounds, is set for release in March 2027 via Back Lounge Publishing.