“We’ve all been through some difficult times,” singer-songwriter Phil Lomac says. “How do we all wake up from a long slumber?”

For Lomac, the answer was putting together a new band. In an era that’s split everybody up, he valued making music together with other human beings—even if they had to wear masks while doing it—and playing the type of music that makes people want to get vaccinated just so they can gather in crowds and dance again. Shake the Dust took its name from one of Lomac’s songs—and it’s no accident that the lyrics of that song are about reconnecting with an old friend.

Shake the Dust is a quartet based in Charlotte, NC, where Lomac moved when he was 17 (after spending his teen years in Germany). While the band’s music is rooted in the FM country-rock sound of the 1970s, Lomac has always drawn on a broad range of influences: he learned to play guitar from a John Denver songbook, but his first album was by Jimi Hendrix. He says, “The eclecticism is what’s interesting to me. We play traditional instruments, but we’re not recording them traditionally.”

Lomac has been praised for his “persuasive melodies, precise instrumentation and coherent rhythms” in The Huffington Post, while For Folk’s Sake praised his album Northern Cities Southern Stars as “a sonic gut-punch of sheer alternative rock, indie pop, and rootsy folk goodness all wrapped into one.”

Shake the Dust, the debut five-song EP by Shake the Dust, was recorded at Old House Recording Studio in Charlotte, over five days of sessions split between February and May 2021. It was produced by the band, engineered by Chris Garges, mixed by Kenny McWilliams at Archer Avenues Studio, and mastered by Dave Harris at Studio B. If you can’t make it to North Carolina to hear Shake the Dust play live, it sounds best played loud in a car, cruising down the highway, looking for adventure with an old friend.