Denver-based six-piece Southern soul/Americana band Clay Street Unit is quickly becoming one of the most sought after bands in the city. Their music feels like driving into the rising sun, the road becoming clearer and clearer as it winds out ahead, the horizon expansive and beckoning, inviting you to leave the night behind you and just keep going. Melding bluegrass traditions with jam sensibilities and distilling them through a distinctly soulful lens, Clay Street Unit’s music makes miles pass in seconds, the future rolling out through the windshield and the past firmly in the rearview. They are a band that celebrates the journey rather than the destination, that recognizes that the bumps encountered along the way are merely part of the greater story as a whole. Life itself is one great story to which all that walk this earth, drive its roads, contribute and Clay Street Unit is here to make sure that story never quite reaches its end.
Clay Street Unit recently released their debut full-length album, Sin & Squalor, on February 13th. It’s a confident debut overflowing with stories of freedom, of love found and lost and found again, a testament to the highways that intersect throughout a lifetime. Plus, it absolutely rips. Denver Dive recently spoke with Clay Street Unit’s lead singer and guitarist Sam Walker about the album, his musical background, the story of Clay Street Unit, his fascination with transience and much more.
Walker grew up in Montgomery, Alabama. Raised by his grandmother alongside his six sisters, he described his childhood as one filled with music. His grandmother and sisters were members of their church’s choir and as such were always singing church hymnals a cappella around the house. Walker described this as how he discovered that he shared a love for singing with the women who raised him. This love would then influence him to join the church choir alongside his family.
When Walker reached high school, he naturally joined the school choir. This led to his first forays into traveling the country, the choir taking him all over from Chicago to New York to Seattle among many other cities across the county, showing him at an early age that the world is a great wide open place. He credits a teacher he met during this period, Dr. Damien Womack, for teaching him that longevity in such an endeavor as singing requires a great deal of work. Walker said, “[Womack] taught me how to fall in love with the work, that it isn’t all just fun. He taught me technique and what it all takes.”
Walker said that music really helped him get through high school. In addition to choir, he played sports along with most of his friends and he loved it but it wasn’t where his heart truly belonged. He said, “Music became one of the few ways that I could express myself honestly. It felt really natural.” Walker finds it interesting that he finds himself playing the kind of music that he does now. He said that if he’d been told 20 years ago during those high school days that one day he’d be singing “a kind of country bluegrass,” he would have laughed whoever was asking away. He said he always envisioned himself as more of a soul singer, per Otis Redding. He loves what he does today, just finds it interesting that this is where he now finds himself.
Eventually, the time came for Walker to leave home and go to college. It was there that he had his first experiences playing in bands. He described his college rock band as “a little unruly and a lot of fun,” saying that the “best music was made” during this time. However, as all things must, this period came to an end and left Walker feeling like a drastic change in scenery. Soon, he made the decision to leave the South and move to Denver where his life would change.
Once Walker arrived in Denver and spent some time settling in, finding his place, he quickly started jamming with people around town. This is when the first pieces of what would become Clay Street Unit started to come together. He described the band’s early formation as “organic,” each member joining at a different period. It began the night he met Clay Street’s banjo player Jack Cline at Zuni Street Brewing (a great brewery known for championing local bluegrass and jam bands while also serving some damn good beer), with Walker saying they hit it off immediately. That night they jammed well into the night and ended up booking a gig as a duo for later that week. Brad Larrison, who would eventually become Clay Street’s pedal steel player, was a bartender at Zuni Street and quickly joined the project. Drummer Brendan Lamb joined and the bones of what would become Clay Street Unit were in place.
A few years prior to this, a bluegrass band called Morsel was making a hell of a name for themselves around town, gaining a reputation for melding powerful songwriting with incredible live shows. All who got to see them remember. But after a time, Morsel decided to call it quits for reasons that can be chalked up to consequences of life and members of the band scattered. Two of the members, bassist Jack Kotarba and mandolinist Scotty Bolin, had become close friends with Walker, decided to join the project he was building and the Clay Street Unit seen today was truly formed. Reflecting on the process, Walker said, “It wasn’t like we woke up one day and decided to form a band. It all happened piece by piece but it all just made sense.”
Given that most of Clay Street Unit grew up all over the South, they took a lot of cues from Southern rock and soul when developing their sound. Walker mentioned that in addition to the hymnals he was raised around, the most formative artists for him were Otis Redding, Marshall Tucker Band and The Allman Brothers. He spoke about how pure those artists’ music is, their honesty in their songwriting. He tries to adhere to this dedication to honesty in his own writing, that even if the stories he tells are works of fiction, their ultimate message comes from a place of authenticity. It’s why audiences have connected so deeply with Clay Street’s music. It’s true and real and holds the stories all people in this world carry with them within it.
The melding of Southern music with soul has allowed Clay Street Unit to develop a truly unique sound that rather transcends easy classification. It can best be described as a sort of soulful blend of Southern folk and Americana with major country and bluegrass influences. Walker believes that the fact that they are a Southern band based in the West has only allowed them more freedom to play with their sound, to make it worthy of the mountains and take inspiration from them when needed. The sound is rollicking and propulsive at times, train beats and fast strings pushing things along, but it’s also sometimes gentle, like a soft Western wind blowing through the trees. It’s a sum of all parts, each member valued and allowed to shine. They have this ability to move from deep introspection to virtuosic musicality that is impossible not to want to jump around to. It’s music that pushes the soul from the body and makes it move so that when it returns it does so glowing.
Clay Street Unit as a whole finds itself poised for greatness but it took them quite some time to get to this point. Walker recounted some early days of the band, early shows that resulted in relative disaster. He recalled a gig they played before the band had even fully formed where everything that could have gone wrong did. He was playing acoustic guitar, Cline was on banjo and their friend John was on mando. The banjo broke a string the first song, the guitar broke one in the second, the mando broke one in the third. They handled it and moved on but it was a rainy, windy night and the PA blew over during the fourth. Finally, the rain really came in and they had to cancel the rest of the set entirely.
Rather than taking it hard or getting discouraged, instead they took it in stride, laughing at their own misfortune. Walker believes experiences such as this “set the tone” for the band in that, while they take what they do incredibly seriously, they also are here to have a good time. Part of that is recognizing that sometimes things go wrong. All you can do is deal with it, laugh at it and keep moving. It’s a theme that’s greatly reflected in their music, the fact that sometimes you are going to break down on the side of the road. It doesn’t mean the journey’s over. It’s all part of the story, all part of a life well lived. Elaborating on this idea, Walker said, “I’m 31 now. From 18 to 22 to 25 to 27, I feel like you’re constantly breaking down and shedding and reevaluating and understanding and shifting.”
After playing gigs for a few years around the Front Range, really getting their name out there, Clay Street Unit worked up to their first release, the 2022 EP “A Mighty Fine Evening.” Recorded in one night, the EP feels simultaneously like a proof of concept and evidence of a confident young band stepping into their own. The EP helped solidify them, helped them reach a wider audience and show that they were ready for what would come.
In the years since, Clay Street Unit’s audience has grown exponentially and continues to do so. They have become bonafide Denver favorites, consistently selling out beloved venues such as the Bluebird Theater and Cervantes’. Last year, they played a much lauded set at Red Rocks opening up for bluegrass heroes Kitchen Dwellers and jamgrass pioneers Leftover Salmon as part of Salmon’s 35th anniversary celebration. It’s all proof that Clay Street Unit is flirting with greatness and, really, they’re just getting started.
Everything up to this point has led to Sin & Squalor, their debut full-length album released on February 13th. Throughout 2025, the band released five singles in the lead up to the album: “Let’s Get Stoned,” “Where Have You Gone?,” “Choctaw County ft. Lindsay Lou,” “Rollin’,” and “Drive.” Each single stands strong on its own but when placed in the context of the full album, they point to just how intentional Clay Street Unit is. Produced by Chris Pandolfi — banjo player for the legendary Infamous Stringdusters — Sin & Squalor feels incredibly cohesive, a feat worth mentioning given it’s the band’s first real album. Each song can stand alone but each feels so much stronger as a part of a whole, all part of the same journey. In this context, the songs feel transient, stops along the way, like looking out the window while driving down the highway. They are honest and alive and filled with so much experience and joy and pain and all that life is. Regarding Sin & Squalor’s themes, Walker said, “The record is about growing and moving and not really being stuck in one place or one point in time. Life is ever-evolving, just like how the Earth moves. We change as it moves and I don’t want to ever be an artist that gets stuck in writing about one thing or one place.”
Walker said that Clay Street Unit’s ongoing success is a result of a group of likeminded, musically inclined people coming together to build something special. He made sure to shout out everyone on the Clay Street team including their agent, Harry Woosley.
Clay Street Unit appeared at the beloved WinterWonderGrass which took place from February 27th to March 1st. They played a late night set on Friday and a main stage set on Sunday. If you happened to miss the festival, they ain’t going anywhere and have a large slate of shows on their ever-expansive horizon set throughout the year, including a July 17th return to Red Rocks supporting The String Cheese Incident. If you haven’t seen them before, make sure you do. Your life will be made better because of it.
Clay Street Unit is a band that reminds those who hear them to just keep going. Life winds and falls, slips around mountains and through deep valleys, ebbs and flows. It’s all one great journey, one beautiful ride into the unknown. Let Clay Street Unit pick you up when your engines fail and help you on down the road.
Listen to Sin & Squalor wherever you stream music.
