LOS Angeles quartet The Americans are playing at The Railway in Winchester on Tuesday.

The Americans released their debut album, I’ll Be Yours, via Loose last year to critical acclaim.

Having started out as a roots band enthralled by pre-war American country and blues, they have evolved into a blistering amalgamation of those influences, injected with a fiery blue collar rock’n’roll attitude, absorbing and reconfiguring the history of American music from Chuck Berry, Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen.

They named themselves after the controversial photo series by Robert Frank, which was first published in 1958 with a foreword by Jack Kerouac.

Like Frank’s photos, The Americans’ songs are miniature biographies, intimate and empathic portraits of individuals that leave much unsaid.

The Americans were plucked from obscurity by Jack White, T Bone Burnett and Robert Redford to appear in the recent PBS/BBC4 series American Epic.

Featuring artists such as Beck, Elton John, Nas, Willie Nelson, Alabama Shakes and many more, the film reconstructs the story of the first American music in the 1920s and re-assembled the recording apparatus that was used at the time.

As experts in early music, The Americans were invited in to figure out the equipment and make the first recordings.

Once the sessions were underway, they functioned as the house band, backing up various artists and suggesting songs to the filmmakers.

The Americans presented their American Music lectures on the pre-war recording era at Liverpool and Edinburgh Universities earlier in the year, as well as at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, the PBS Annual Meeting in Austin and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

They’ll be bringing the lecture to Berlin, Göttingen and Münster this summer.

For more info, or to book, visit: www.railwayinn.pub.