Eight Essential Koe Wetzel Songs We Hope He Plays at Billboard’s The Stage at SXSW

When Koe Wetzel plays Billboard’s The Stage at SXSW Thursday night (March 13) at Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park in Austin, fans can expect a typically high-octane, guitar-driven show full of songs about road life and troubled relationships, both often fueled by substances.

For the past 10 years, Wetzel has been entertaining Texans — and in recent years, he’s expanded outside both Texas’ and the United States’ borders — with his rough and rowdy brand of Red Dirt music that draws as much from Nirvana as it does from Willie, Waylon and his namesake, David Allen Coe.

Already a sensation in the Lone Star State — he hails from the tiny East Texas hamlet of Pittsburg, population 4,335 — Wetzel recently saw his popularity reach a new plateau with “High Road,” his jagged duet with Jessie Murph from 2024’s 9 Lives. That song became not only his first song to appear on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart, but his first to reach No.1 on the survey, where it stayed for five weeks in December and January.

Before that milestone, Wetzel was already routinely registering songs on Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart from his first two sets for Columbia Records, 2020’s Sellout and 2022’s Hell Paso.

Below are eight essential Wetzel songs, many of which he’s guaranteed to play Wednesday night. He knows he can’t leave the stage without playing “February 28, 2016” or “Drunk Driving,” and maybe he’ll reach back to his earliest days for the searing “Gravedigger.”

Opening for Wetzel will be Ashley Cooke and George Birge. Tickets are available here.