Roger Clyne on 30 Years of the Refreshments’ ‘Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy’: ‘The Lighting of the Fuse’

Desert Rock Redux Roger Clyne on 30 Years of the Refreshments’ ‘Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy’: ‘The Lighting of the Fuse’ The indie stalwart, who drops the new album Hell to Breakfast with his band the Peacemakers this week, looks back on three decades of desert rock By Josh Crutchmer Josh Crutchmer View all posts by Josh Crutchmer March 5, 2026 For 30 years, Roger Clyne has been inviting listeners to the dusty cattle ranches, tequila-stocked cantinas, and notorious narcotics pathways where his native Arizona meets the Mexico borderlands. “Everybody can hear the Sonoran Desert in this music,” Clyne tells me. He’s sipping a margarita in his backyard in Tempe, Arizona, a few blocks from the college bars that made him famous with the Refreshments , and a hundred miles from his family’s cattle ranch between Tucson and the Mexico line. Now, a brand new Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers record is dropping at the same time that Clyne is celebrating the album that started it all. In late 1995, Clyne rose to prominence with the Refreshments, a four-piece college rock band from Tempe — part of a wave of post-grunge acts from the college town including Gin Blossoms and Dead Hot Workshop. They topped the Billboard Heatseekers chart and had a Hot 100 single, “Banditos,” and penned the instrumental “Yahoos and Triangles” — better known as the theme song to King of the Hill . By 1998, the group had disbanded. In its wake, Clyne and Refreshments drummer P.H. Naffah formed Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers. On Friday, the group will release Hell to Breakfast , their ninth studio album and first since 2017’s Native Heart . The nine-year gap between records, Clyne says, was part purpose and part accident. He struggled to process the impact Covid had on both his music and the world, but he also wanted his melodies and lyrics to cover new ground. “The world was a rocky place full of chaos and vitriol, and I had already written 10 records,” Clyne tells Rolling Stone . “Not that chaos and vitriol aren...