Dexter and the Moonrocks Announce Debut Album 'Friends That I Don't Like' After 'Freakin' Out' Breakthrough

Dexter and the Moonrocks will release their debut full-length album, Friends That I Don't Like, on 2 October, capping a year in which the north-west Texas band turned a self-described "Western space grunge" sound into a genuine chart presence.

The four-piece, who got together outside Abilene and released their first single in 2021, made the announcement on what their social accounts flagged as the fifth anniversary of their first-ever song, "couch" (Billboard). All four members still live within two hours of each other in that corner of the state.

The album news arrives on the back of "Freakin' Out," the single that spent five weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Alternative Airplay chart — the band's second No. 1 on that tally, which tracks radio airplay across US alternative stations (Billboard). The song went further: it crossed onto the Billboard Pop Airplay chart, reached No. 33 on the Billboard Hot 100, and became the band's first entry on that all-genre singles ranking (Billboard).

Earlier this month, the band played their first late-night television performance, delivering "Freakin' Out" on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (Consequence).

The path to a debut album was neither sudden nor conventionally fast. After self-releasing music from 2021, the band signed with Severance Records in a joint venture with Big Loud Rock in 2023 — a deal structure in which two labels share A&R, marketing and distribution responsibilities. Their label debut arrived the following year: the July 2024 EP Western Space Grunge, which also gave the band the name for their genre tag (Billboard; Apple Music). A second EP, Happy to Be Here, followed (Apple Music).

The band's official site describes their sound as a blend of Southern alternative music (dexterandthemoonrocks.com), a label that sits comfortably alongside the "Western space grunge" tag they chose themselves. Either way, the throughline is geography: the music comes from and stays rooted in the plains of north-west Texas.

For a band whose first song was called "couch," the distance travelled is measurable in chart positions and late-night TV slots, not just streaming numbers. The 2 October release of Friends That I Don't Like will be the first test of whether that radio and television exposure converts into first-week album sales — the industry metric that combines physical copies, digital downloads and streaming equivalent album units, the measure that converts plays into album sales.

The album lands on a Thursday, the standard US release day.