Few names have sent shockwaves through the world of rock this year quite like Dexter and The Moonrocks.

From viral tunes to taking over late-night national TV, their name has been everywhere for good reason. And in seeing out their biggest year yet, they are putting the cherry on top with their debut full-length album ‘Friends That I Don’t Like’. A record that blends soaring rock songs with country-fried attitude, it is made to be played loud, proud and often. For every party, long drive and existential crisis inbetween.

To look ahead to the album’s release and sum up 2026, Rock Sound caught up with drummer Ryan Fox whilst out on the road as they make an even bigger name for themselves.

Rock Sound: How does it feel to be at this point, with your debut album right around the corner?

Ryan: It’s a weight off the shoulders, to be honest. You want to get it right, but it’s all that any of us have been listening to for the past two months. Tongue-in-cheek, we said we were going to release singles this year unless we had one of the biggest songs in the world. We’d be like, ‘Haha, that’s not gonna happen’. And then two singles into the year, we released ‘Freakin’ Out’, and I was like, ‘Oh crap, we have to do an album’. And so, we wrote the whole thing in May, and then recorded it in June and July. And since then, we’ve been sitting with it, and it’s been really nice. And now that we can unveil it all, that’s been really awesome.

RS: It’s pretty amazing to have so much of this process still feel so fresh. It’s a very rare occurrence for bands to release something so close to making it, let alone writing it. How did it feel to have things moving so quickly?

Ryan: The thing is that it wasn’t a challenge. We all looked at each other, and we were like, ‘Okay, we just need to lock in and just be us.’ So we made a bunch of songs we loved and thought were dope. This is just who we are. This is everything we’ve learned. This is what we want to be. James and Ryan and Ty and me; these are our personalities. These are the things we want to do. And credit to our label, we didn’t really go through the whole A&R process of ‘Here’s all the demos. What do you think?’ We kind of just went, ‘We’re going to the middle of nowhere in Texas. We will have an album to you in a month. Goodbye’, and they had a lot of trust in us to do that. I don’t think we really felt pressure. It was more like excitement of ‘Oh, we finally get to do this.’

RS: There’s been a real resurgence of bands returning to that mindset after drifting into the unknown over the last few years. But when this is who you have always been, it’s easy to keep that way of thinking and creating central to everything you do.

Ryan: Yeah, and I think it’s such a southern small-town Texas mentality that we have, too. When you get raised out there, you’re just like, “This is who I am. This is what’s going to happen. Leave me out of it.’ We did a whole year of like, ‘Well, let’s listen to the people who know what they’re doing’, and then we realise, well, we don’t know what we’re doing, and nobody else knows what we want to be doing. So why don’t we just do what we like? When we’re making music, or when we’re making content, or when we’re doing anything, what do we think is dope? If we think it’s cool, and we’ve done a good job building our culture, chances are our fans are gonna think it’s cool, too. That’s been such a goal of ours; we’re going to be genuine no matter what. And that’s led to it being very easy to make something that our fan base can resonate with.

RS: You mention how the success of ‘Freakin’ Out’ was a big catalyst for you getting into the album writing process. How did you all feel about that song whilst you were making it?

Ryan: When we wrote it, just on an acoustic guitar, we were like, ‘Oh, this is really fun, this is cool’. The drop and the bigger sound didn’t really exist until we got in the studio, and I think that’s where me and James were like, “Oh, this is going to do something’. The reason we work so hard is that we have always had this feeling that we would be a big rock band, but I don’t think we quite knew what the fuck that meant. We just knew we had to keep going at it. In my head, I don’t think we were ever going to be playing at a fucking football stadium, you know what I mean? We always just felt like we were going to work hard and we’re going to be a big band from that. So we thought it would be cool if ‘Freakin’ Out’ would get us to one million monthly listeners, and now we’re at almost ten million. Now we are going to be something, but I don’t think we truly understood what it meant to enter that level. Now we have a platform for ourselves on that level.

RS: How do you feel the rapidness of what has occurred this Summer has affected the four of you as friends and bandmates?

Ryan: I think we’ve got closer. We’ve had to. We were like, ‘Okay, for the next six months, we have got to lock in, and it’s going to really suck’. But we’re in this together. We have to figure out how to deal with success together. Having an outlet to talk to each other about that, and just being honest about the pressures of doing interviews or having to perform on national TV. I think we were already a family, but this has only made us more so. What’s so strong about Dexter, too, is that we all think and move in one direction, and that has made it easy for us to keep being ourselves.

RS: And as you head closer and closer to the release of the record, what are you most proud of achieving?

Ryan: I think in a world of everybody getting called an industry plant or a nepo-baby or whatever, it’s very cool that our lead singer was a fry cook. Our lead guitarist stained and decorated concrete. Our bass player worked on an oil rig. Everybody is from a town of 700 people. I grew up in a bigger city, but then I moved to that town, and I coached baseball. We’re from the middle of nowhere, and we truly did it ourselves. We fought for it ourselves. We grinded it out. We figured out how to show up every day and work. That’s what I’m most proud of. This story has led to us finally being able to have the resources to go, ‘You know what? Here’s us at our best.’ This album exists because we worked hard, and we know what working hard is because we were doing fucking physical labour. We’re just very grateful for that, and very excited that the hard work’s there, and we still have more hard work to be done. We have something to show for it. We weren’t crazy. The dream that we all believed in was right, and we were right. We are an awesome rock band, and it feels incredible and humbling to say that.

‘Friends That I Don’t Like’ will be released on October 02 via Severance Records and Big Loud Rock.