内容摘要：Rodeo Boys are experts in sugary, spirited hooks — from 2019’s debut “Cherry” to their 2023 Don Giovanni Records debut “Home Movies.” But the Lansing, Michigan, group’s 2025 album “Junior,” out Friday, takes them to great new heights — a collection of sardonic, queer Americana, melodic songs for and by the heartland. The best description of the band is the one they wrote themselves: “Rodeo Boys is what happens when the Miller High Life gets legs and starts walking around on its own.” Yeehaw.

Rodeo Boys are experts in sugary, spirited hooks — from 2019’s debut “Cherry” to their 2023 Don Giovanni Records debut “Home Movies.” But the Lansing, Michigan, group’s 2025 album “Junior,” out Friday, takes them to great new heights — a collection of sardonic, queer Americana, melodic songs for and by the heartland. The best description of the band is the one they wrote themselves: “Rodeo Boys is what happens when the Miller High Life gets legs and starts walking around on its own.” Yeehaw.

BACKSTORY: Keying in on the ethos and tone of Steinbeck’s Depression-era classic “The Grapes of Wrath,” Springsteen chronicles modern-day people at the fringes of society trying to get by on the road. “The highway is alive tonight,” he says, “but nobody’s kiddin’ nobody about where it goes.”LYRIC: “At night they come across the levy in the searchlight’s dusty glow. We’d rush ‘em in our Broncos and force ’em back down into the river below.”

YEAR/ALBUM: 1995, “The Ghost of Tom Joad”BACKSTORY: The tale of a lonely, widowed border patrol agent who falls for one of the illegal immigrants caught crossing the border. It leads him to confront his hypocrisy and leave the job, still searching for the woman he met fleetingly. Its companion song on the album, “Across the Border,” was written from the perspective of a Mexican man dreaming of America (“For you I’ll build a house high upon a grassy hill, somewhere across the border”).LYRIC: “Lost track of how far I’ve gone — how far I’ve gone, how high I’ve climbed. On my back’s a 60-pound stone; on my shoulder a half-mile line.”

YEAR/ALBUM: 2002, “The Rising”BACKSTORY: Barely a year after “American Skin,” Springsteen turned back to first responders in the wake of 9/11, venerating them with a song that tells of a firefighter ascending the steps of one of the Twin Towers to save people — and, presumably dying along the way. He sings of a “sky of blackness and sorrow, sky of love, sky of tears, sky of glory and sadness, sky of mercy, sky of fear.” He takes no political position but — in his typical way — shows one of history’s most political events through the lens of a regular person caught up in it.

LYRIC: “The banker man grows fat, working man grows thin. It’s all happened before and it’ll happen again.”

YEAR/ALBUM: 2012, “Wrecking Ball”“In eight months he can’t fix the mess they made in 20 years,” she said.

Felipe reaches through the door of a bakery where his parents Walter and Evelyn wait to take home discarded baked goods that the shop didn’t sell in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)Felipe reaches through the door of a bakery where his parents Walter and Evelyn wait to take home discarded baked goods that the shop didn’t sell in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Follow AP’s Latin America coverage atDONETSK REGION, Ukraine (AP) — The Ukrainian intelligence soldier doesn’t know how long his clinical death lasted after an explosive detonated beneath him.