Muscadine Bloodline makes it personal right up front on the new album “Teenage Dixie,” leading with the image of high-school misadventures and “blue lights flashing down Riviere du Chien.”

For those unfamiliar, the reference (pronounced River doo Shane) is both to an area along Dog River and to the road that is the only paved way in or out. That lack of access means maybe it’s not the best place for mischief that might draw police attention – a point that makes Charlie Muncaster and Gary Stanton laugh out loud.

“That’s right!” said Stanton. “One of my best friends lived off Riviere du Chien so I spent a lot of time and honestly, for better or worse, got in some trouble down there a few times when I was in high school.”

It’s one of several local references he and Muncaster packed into “Teenage Dixie,” which will be released Feb. 24. “Devil Died in Dixie” is a sequel to Charlie Daniels’ “Devil Went Down to Georgia,” where the devil seeks a rematch in Monroe County only to run into Stanton’s grandfather. “Old Man Gillich” is an ode to a legendary Dixie Mafia figure from Biloxi: “Old Man Gillich stood 10 feet tall/ way up the ladder and above the law.” And then there’s “Shootout in Saraland,” which revisits some old-time Hatfield-McCoy-type action.

“Throwing some odes to our hometown, to things that are actual places and not just ideas, is a really fun thing,” Stanton said. “We’ve got a lot of that with this record coming up. They say write what you know and that’s what we know. Whether or not people know where Riviere du Chien is, they have their own Riviere du Chien, their own story. … It’s just funny to see people from Mobile [react] like, ‘Holy crap, they said Riviere du Chien in that song!’”

Stanton and Muncaster formed Muscadine Bloodline a few years back, after an initial meeting when Stanton opened a show for Muncaster at Soul Kitchen. They’ve been grinding it out for about seven years, building a fan base through touring and streaming, while also getting significant pings on mainstream radar. A Rolling Stone writer said a previous album was characterized by “signature tight harmonies [that] are accented by knotty, twangy bursts of electric guitar.” Billboard.com has taken notice of the duo several times, in part because they’ve made it onto the charts. The 2022 single “Me On You” hit No. 2 in Country Digital Song Sales and No. 8 on the comparable all-genre chart, and the duo racked up a reported 450 million U.S. streams overall in 2022.

When Stanton and Muncaster spoke to AL.com in August 2022, they were celebrating another big milestone: They were touring in a bus rather than a van. “We were in a Sprinter van for the past six years,” Stanton said at the time. “You know, you’ve got eight sweaty, smelly dudes and you can’t really sleep. It probably took some years off our lives to get where we are … We earned this thing. It wasn’t like we just started touring and a label got a lease for it. We’ve been grinding and got to the point we could afford it. It’s kind of a like a testament to hard work paying off.”

At the time, “Teenage Dixie” was basically finished and they felt like they had something special. As Stanton put it, “We finally found what we’re supposed to be doing sonically and what we’re trying to say.”

“Teenage Dixie” will be released on Feb. 24, and an early listen bears out that statement. You get 16 tracks of raucous, rowdy, rough-around-the-edges guitar-driven country that is written for people who are ready to have a good time right now.

Heck, even when Muscadine Bloodline dips into Nashville nostalgia, the addictive syrup that make so much country music so derivative, the result is engagingly scruffy. The song right after “Teenage Dixie” is “Pocketful of ‘90s Country,” which rowdily sings the praises of folks like Travis Tritt, John Michael Montgomery, Brooks & Dunn and Alan Jackson – and the Dixie Chicks, Reba McEntire and Martina McBride.

“Country ain’t what country was but it comes back around,” is the first of the lines that kick off the dancefloor-ready tune. “It’s a five-piece band from Dixie land that’s coming to your town/ It’s a lot of folks like me who gave up on the radio/ and they’re wearing out the CDs of the solid country gold/ I get the juke joint jumpin’, I get to carryin’ on/ got a pocket full of nothin’ but some ‘90s country songs.”

Aside from a couple of memorable ballads – “Made Her that Way” and “Azalea Blooms” – Muncaster and Stanton sound like a couple of guys having a lot of fun doing what they’re doing. That’s never more true than on “Inconvenience Store,” a song that features them as a couple of inept would-be robbers, accidentally using each-others’ names mid-crime and telling each other “get the green paper, keep all the quarters for sure.” Stanton said the back-and-forth concept was inspired in a roundabout way by the Hank Williams Jr.-Waylon Jennings track “The Conversation.”

“It kind of started writing itself,” said Stanton. “I said, ‘What if we wrote a song about us sticking up a convenience store?’ I remember sending a verse to Charlie, and Charlie got a laugh out of it, because we actually drop both of our names, it’s like us talking to each other throughout the song.”

“It catches people off guard,” said Muncaster. “It’s really funny to perform it live and just watch people … before it was out, especially, it was hilarious to watch them watch us tell the story.”

Storytelling is becoming a theme, it turns out. Muncaster and Stanton said they traveled to Missouri to work on a video for “Shootout in Saraland” that’s practically a short film.

“It’s pretty much a music video, it’s our first stab at doing a little acting instead of just singing to the song,” said Stanton. “It was really cool to do it. It’s pretty much ‘Ozark’ meets Hatfields vs. McCoys that’s based in today’s time. It’s got gunfighting scenes and all the stuff you think of, things exploding and that sort of stuff.”

“It was a blast to be diving into all that,” said Muncaster. “We really didn’t think we had it in us but it’s pretty fun.”

(That’s not out yet, as of this writing. But if you look on YouTube and you’ll find fresh clips for “Teenage Dixie” and “Inconvenience Store.”)

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you Charlie and I are the meanest, most outlaw guys ever, cause we’re not,” said Stanton. “We’re pretty domesticated. We’re just telling stories. We’re just the vessel telling a story. And it seems like people are craving more intentional writing instead of just getting a theme.”

The growing sense that they’re storytellers also helps the duo be more intentional about where they’re headed, artistically.

“When you’ve got a record that’s 16 songs long, it give you a lot of variety,” said Stanton “And that’s how we want to make music. We used to write songs all the time just to add to the catalog. Now it’s writing for a project. What does this project need? A song has to fit the place where the rest of the songs take place. That’s why we named the record ‘Teenage Dixie.’ We spent our formative years in Alabama, before we went off to college and different things. We’re proud of where we’re from and we want to do our best to be vessels for Alabama.”

There’s more to come.

“Once we finished this record, we just kept writing and working on other stuff, and it’s kind of like, this record is going to be a part of a three-part series. This is Part One,” said Stanton.

“We’ve never had this much anticipation before, which is really exciting,” he said. “It’s not scary, but it’s the unknown.”