The honky tonk-meets-Laurel Canyon trio broke big and bigger with their first two albums, but then the hits stopped coming. For their fourth LP, Barely Blue, they went looking for something more.

By all rights, Midland should be hitting the slots right now. The Austin, Texas, trio are the funnest thing going in country music, the types of guys who, last April, hosted their own Caribbean cruise, where singer Mark Wystrach blew a cool $1,200 on a hand of blackjack. But not today. A few hours before the band are due to play at Foxwoods Resort Casino in southeast Connecticut, Wystrach steps from the August heat into a backstage dressing room, brow glistening, fresh from a round of golf.

"They paired me with a couple doctors from Boston," Wystrach says, peering through a pair of lightly-tinted yellow sunglasses. Even in a polo and slacks, his shaggy hair greased and matted into swoops and curls, he was bound to attract questions. His partners, inevitably, wanted to know what he does for a living. "Turns out they're big fans," he says.

And yet, they didn't recognize him? Wystrach's face lights up. "I'm not that famous," he deadpans, grinning as though he just let slip a secret.

Wystrach is a little incognito these days. He sports a thick, knotted beard, which he grew for an upcoming role in an Amazon TV drama, The Runarounds. But there's a ring of truth to what he says, all the same. As Midland prepare to release their fourth studio album, Barely Blue, on Sept. 20, Wystrach and his bandmates -- guitarist Jess Carson and bassist Cameron Duddy -- have the air of a band who know their place in the world, and are ready to get down to the business of bettering their craft.

"We knew that the album had to be special. And for us, it wasn't about the quantity, it was really about the quality of the songs," Wystrach says, folding his six-foot frame into a sunken leather chair. The other two men are on a nearby couch, Carson curled up on the edge of the cushion and Duddy with his cowboy-booted feet up on a coffee table, gradually sliding down until he's all but prostrate.

"We wanted every single song to be special, to mean something," Wystrach adds, "and be something we want to continue to play for 10 years."

Not so long ago, Midland weren't worried about the long game. They were the new kids on the block, scoring a career-defining country hit in 2017 with their first-ever single, "Drinkin' Problem," which has since gone five times platinum. They swashbuckled their way onto country's biggest stages, a group of heartthrob interlopers who adored the classics and knew how to rock a rhinestone suit.

Orville Peck, the masked country crooner with his own retro style, sensed a sea change from the time Midland hit the airwaves. "They are so committed to what they're trying to do. And they make other people fit that in rather than fitting in for other people," he says. "I love that they just stick to their guns."

Earlier this year, Peck teamed up with the group for "The Hurtin' Kind," an iridescent ghost song about a honky-tonk-of-the-mind that they premiered on Midland's The Last Resort Cruise. "They're all great students of music, and they're all fans of music," Peck says, "which is rare in this industry."

Today, vintage clothes and storytelling chops are en vogue once more in Nashville, but Midland aren't so ubiquitous. So for Barely Blue, they've teamed up with hot-shot producer Dave Cobb (Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile) and taken aim at something bigger than chasing the next hit: trying to build a legacy. In that sense, the stakes couldn't be higher.

"I think we're at the stage where we really are feeling different about the act of putting music out than we were when we started," Duddy says. He fidgets with a Midland trucker hat, tossing his long, pepper-gray hair back with his free hand. "To us, it feels like a radical departure," he says. "But I feel like it's still Midland."

When it comes to cutting records, Savannah, Georgia, is a long way from Nashville. The ocean air, the Spanish moss, the Victorian architecture -- it's a far cry from the tourist trap bars of Lower Broadway or assembly-line studios on Music Row. And it's just what Midland got when they signed up to record with Cobb.

"It wound up being more like this retreat," Wystrach says of the sessions at Cobb's home studio. He describes long nights spent around the bonfire, fishing off the dock and getting to know Cobb's most trusted players, Phil Towns and the Powell brothers, Chris and Leroy. "It was like going on a trip with your best friends and meeting a bunch of even cooler guys," he says.

Midland rubbed off on Savannah, in turn. Cobb recalls taking them to his favorite restaurant, Common Thread, and Duddy breaking out in a traditional Greek dance. "He just busted out in this fine-dining establishment, hitting his leg, going across [his body]. He was borderline breaking plates," Cobb says, unable to stop laughing. "The whole place was looking at him. [But] everyone loved it. It was so fun."

All three of Midland's prior albums were cut in Nashville with the same core team of producers. While Carson says he "love[s] everything that we've done up to this," he was ready to scrub away the Music City polish. "That's just the Nashville way of doing things. It's very glossy, the studios are big and what you get is a very slick-sounding record," he says. With Cobb, "It was like going back to something more human, less fussy, less worried about being perfect."

It was, in a sense, a return to the origins of the band. Back in 2013, Wystrach, Carson and Duddy jammed for the first time at Duddy's wedding in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, then hit the studio the following January to cut some demos at Sonic Ranch in El Paso, Texas. Wystrach still speaks reverently of those sessions. He likens it to the process for Barely Blue. "It was like, go on this journey together, kind of get lost in the music," he says.

When the group later arrived with "Drinkin' Problem" in the winter of 2017, Nashville was in the throes of its bro-country obsession. Midland's throwback honky tonk appeal, steeped in George Strait and Dwight Yoakam, was a welcome reprieve from red cups and pickup trucks. They were clever, too, oozed charisma, and, above all, fun. It didn't hurt that they looked like they'd stepped straight out of Gilley's bar in Urban Cowboy.

"There wasn't anybody in Nashville wearing a cowboy hat [at the time]. Nobody had put on a Nudie suit for decades," Carson says. "I can't believe that we got a record deal. I can't believe that we got somebody to manage us. Because it was so far from anything going on at that time."

Midland became staples of country's biggest award shows, played all the late night TV stages, and kept scoring hits. Their debut album, On the Rocks, rose to No. 2 on the country charts, and when they released a followup, Let It Roll, in 2019, it debuted at No. 1. By then, Duddy says, they had an air of invincibility. "The second one was [all] bravado going in and really thinking that we were big-dick swinging around, like we're coming off a big hit right from the road into the studio," he says.

No sooner were the trio climbing the charts, however, than the haters came out of the woodwork. Duddy's offhand comment in an interview about the band putting in their proverbial "10,000 hours" in dive bars helped spark a public debate about their "authenticity." They hadn't really paid their dues, the accusations went. They weren't the real deal, just a bunch of West Coast wannabes. They weren't really country.

"There were a lot of attempts at, like, really going after each one of us personally," Wystrach says. He, in particular, seemed to be a target due to his background working as a model -- never mind that he grew up on a ranch in Arizona or that his parents owned a honky tonk. "For me, it was just dumb. Like, you don't even know who I am or where I come from, what I've done," he says. "It just seemed like such a distraction from the music that we were making."

Being both attractive and stylish, at a time when male artists in the genre were expected to wear trucker hats and T-shirts, was also used against them -- another sign of their supposed artifice. Beneath the authenticity rhetoric, there was a deeper, unspoken transgression: Midland weren't masculine in the way they were supposed to be. "They have, for lack of a better word, a sort of sexiness to their music that I think bro country lost," Peck argues. "It's a great, romantic sort of aesthetic that they have. There's not many other male acts leaning into that, and I really appreciate that about them."

All the same, Duddy admits that they felt the need to earn their acceptance from the industry. "It didn't happen in one album or one day or one month or one year, even," he says with a shrug. They responded by putting in the hard miles on the road, playing up to 130 shows a year.

For Cobb, the only question coming into Barely Blue was whether they were people he could get behind. "They are what the music they make [suggests]," he says. "They're not faking it. They are those people. And I think I wouldn't have touched the record if I didn't feel like they were exactly what they represent."

Midland had a more existential quandary to confront as they started work on Barely Blue. When they'd returned with their third LP, The Last Resort, in 2022, they found a dramatically different climate from before. Those headline-grabbing sales of the first two records deserted them. The album barely cracked the country Top 40, which neither of its singles managed to do. Meanwhile, they watched an upstart like Zach Bryan rack up millions of streams and fill stadiums without a whiff of help from country radio.

"Radio's not a thing anymore," Duddy insists. "Which is okay with us because radio kinda stopped caring about us after the first album, and we were able to continue to grow significantly without, like, any real radio hits."

Cobb sensed their determination from the time they landed in Savannah. "I think they wanted to, not reinvent things, but kind of find new directions and new sounds," he says. "I just felt like they were down for exploring, and I really love that on this record." Sometimes that meant taking on new responsibilities, like arranging their own harmonies for the first time -- something previously done by producer Josh Osborne. More often, however, the band were ready to follow Cobb's vision. "He does not have eight different ways he records," says Duddy. "He has one fucking way."

Ceding some of that control helped make the Barely Blue sessions the most harmonious they've experienced together. "In the past, I feel like there's been a lot of tension in the studio, which is because you have three songwriters, three players, and all of us are producers as well," Wystrach says. "Everybody's putting on that cap and everybody has a strong opinion -- which is good." If anything, they were ready to advocate for one another: "Halfway to Heaven," for instance, was an old song of Carson's that Duddy slipped to Cobb, "knowing that Jess probably wouldn't have gone out of his way" to promote it.

"Halfway to Heaven" wound up being a perfect summary of the album, a drowsy, dreamy singalong decorated with sun-kissed harmonies. "It skips along at a soulful, two-stepping clip, and Cobb says it reminds him of classic Miami records from the '70s by the Eagles or Eric Clapton." This time around, there are fewer of the one liners and winking turns of phrase that defined old favorites like "Drinkin' Problem," "Mr. Lonely" or "Longneck Way to Go," save for the rambunctious "Vegas" -- the first song Midland have ever recorded that they didn't write themselves. But they're not exactly missed, either, as the album delves into more nuanced emotional territory.

"I really like the songwriting," Cobb argues. "I think they really did a great job writing this record. They matured as songwriters, you know. Really kind of went deep. I think this happens with age."

Indeed, there's an undercurrent of sadness running through many of Barely Blue's songs, including "Halfway to Heaven." It never quite spoils the mood, but adds depth to the shiny surfaces. Others, like the title track or "Better Than a Memory," are populated by men who always seem to be grappling with something -- their inability to measure up, to find fulfillment, or to express their inner feelings, even when real love is at stake. Wystrach grows cagey about opening himself up too much in conversation -- "I don't want to reveal personal, intimate scars and stuff," he says -- but admits he will "directly pull from my own personal experience" in his writing.

"The songwriting, very often for us, does touch upon darker themes, because songwriting is where you're kind of opening your soul and you're touching emotions that maybe you don't normally share with people," Wystrach says. "And I think that's what all three of us love about country music, is talking about pretty heavy things but putting a backbeat to it."

An hour before showtime at the Foxwoods, Wystrach, Carson and Duddy are seated on three wooden stools at the center of the theater stage, acoustic guitars in hand. Before them in the red-plush chairs below are about 40 fans here for a 30-minute meet and greet. They've come with plenty of questions, ready to reminisce about shows they've seen past, and to ask to hear the songs they love best. Mostly the deep cuts.

One such request is "The Gator Boys," a goofy send-up that Midland never officially cut in the studio. Though only ever intended to be a vocal warmup, it got recorded during an iHeart Radio Live session in 2018 and has been a fan favorite ever since. They barely get into the opening bars before Duddy tells them to stop, insisting they start over and get the harmony right.

"We haven't played this in a long time," Wystrach apologizes, brushing it off with jokey embarrassment. "We don't remember all the words to the song." The crowd laughs with approval.

Midland fans are a passionate group, and they're not afraid to travel. One man in the crowd was at the previous night's stop outside Syracuse, New York, nearly 300 miles away. "This guy, you know, he went to my parents' honky tonk in Arizona and had drinks with my mom and dad," Wystrach says backstage. "We have these kinds of fans that are super fans, like Phish or Grateful Dead [and] they like to see us in different venues."

From the outset, the band have gotten fans in on the party: During their breakout tour with Kenny Chesney in 2017, they got carried away and chucked unopened beer bottles into the crowd. Even today, Duddy is known to kiss the odd elderly fan onstage. One recent video from Saratoga, California, showed him swooping down gallantly to land one on an 83-year-old woman on her birthday. ("I believe there's a pretty strict 65 and older policy to any of Cameron's kisses," warns tour manager, Dave Kotton.)

That ardent following is a big reason why Midland seem so comfortable about where they sit today. Since coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, business has been booming. "Our touring is like this," Wystrach says, holding his hand flat in front of him at a steep upward angle. Tonight's show will hold just shy of 2,000 fans and the upcoming Get Lucky Tour features venues with capacities that range between 2,500 and 6,000 people. "I mean, the crowds are growing. The venues where we're playing are growing." It's also why he says the focus is to write songs that work well live. "I don't think we're writing songs or cutting them in the hopes that we'll have a No. 1 country smash," he confesses.

It made sense, then, to launch The Last Resort Cruise last spring. The voyage attracted some 1,800 fans who spent four days sailing from Miami to the Bahamas, living it up with the band and some of their buddies, including Orville Peck, Jamie Wyatt and Nikki Lane. The band played drinking games with fans and gambled with them, too. Duddy even sang karaoke with one who "probably comes to two-thirds of our shows," according to Carson.

Peck had never been on a cruise before, but was happy to do so when Midland asked. "They just became total friends," Peck says. He likens hanging out with them to growing up with his brothers. "We just laugh all the time. I bust their balls, which I think they like, because I don't know if many people do that. So I give them a hard time about everything."

Whether they've gotten more serious or not, Midland still know how to cut loose -- but they haven't finished striving, either. "Are we where we want to be yet? No," Wystrach says. "But that's also good, because you need something to drive you on." For Duddy, that means making more music, plain and simple. "I know for myself, I'm fucking way less anxious if I'm in a state of creativity, always. But I mean, the bottom line is, it's also the lifeblood of this band," he says.

"So if anything," Duddy adds, "I think the ambition is to continue doing the thing that we're meant to be doing -- which is writing, recording and putting out songs."