In any contemplation of the Southern rock idiom, it’s hard to dispel images of head-down, half-hour guitar solos and drunk bikers yelling “Freebird”. It’s high time the genre had a makeover, and Drive-By Truckers are putting a whole new face on their sweet home Alabama.

Actually, not that new, as I’m reminded when the band’s front man, Patterson Hood, tells me they played their 1,000th gig — many of them marathons — 18 months ago. During some formative years of repeated line-up changes and broken-down borrowed cars, struggling to and from endless no-mark gigs, the Truckers were often looking up for the next thing to bring them down.

But a decade of resilience has brought still-growing stature as perhaps the most articulate guitar-slingers ever to represent the southern states. Having seen them at this month’s South by Southwest festival in Texas, it is not hard to predict that the Truckers’ imminent British tour will consummate the promise of their excellent new album, A Blessing and a Curse.

The band have already constructed a healthy British following with albums such as 2003’s Decoration Day and its ambitious two-disc predecessor, A Southern Rock Opera. It’s an almost unknown phenomenon these days, but Drive-By Truckers are marking their 10th anniversary on an upward trajectory — at a perfect crossroads of the drawl of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the pomp of the Stones and the punk of Hood’s years in junior high.

His incisive observations on wild times and messed-up, drug- and drink-infested relationships have the grit from those 1,000 gigs. On Aftermath USA, after a guitar setup by Jason Isbell that’s right out of Ronnie Wood’s Faces, Hood staggers out of bed to observe the wreckage of the night before: broken glass on the floor, crystal meth in the bathtub and a car sprawled sideways, full of “the smell of musk and deception”.

On the brilliant, heart-stopping finale, World of Hurt, plaintive pedal steel accompanies his spoken observations about pulling back from self-destruction. “I was 27 when I figured out that blowing my brains out wasn’t the answer,” he says calmly. “So I decided maybe I should find a way to make this world work out for me.”

“I’m extra-proud of that one,” Hood tells me. “That’s the way I heard it in my head. As a band, we never tell each other what to play. It’s part of the process we have. When I write a song, I’ll play it for everybody, then what they play is their business. But I’ve been with these guys a long time.”

The most recent personnel switch came after Decoration Day. At odds with the ingrained masculinity of the musical dialect, the bassist Shonna Tucker was voted into the group. “Shonna joining was one of the easiest things that’s ever happened,” says Hood. “She’s a phenomenal musician and a really cool person. As far as having a girl in the band goes, I think we’ve always had girls in the band.” His eyes glint. “We just finally got one who’s female.”

When the Truckers got together in 1996, Hood had already been in bands with fellow founder Mike Cooley for ever. “Cooley and I have played together for 20 years last August, and we spent the first 10 at each other’s throats. By the time we formed Drive-By Truckers, he and I kind of got along.”

Hood now lives in Athens, Georgia, but he grew up in Alabama towns such as Auburn and the celebrated Muscle Shoals, where his father, David, was a member of the revered rhythm section at Rick Hall’s Fame Studios in the 1960s. “What I do couldn’t be any more different than what my dad did, other than they’re both music-related,” he says. “I could never have done what he did. The idea of playing with someone different every week could be really attractive when it’s Aretha Franklin, and the next week it’s Wilson Pickett, and the week after Willie Nelson. But some weeks it’s somebody where the label just has money to hire the musicians, and the songs suck.

“That would involve a degree of being able to separate yourself from your passion about it. That I’ve never been able to fathom, which makes me respect him all that much more. He probably wanted a better life for his son, and I took that the wrong way. I love it when he comes to see us now. It’s all come full circle.”

Hood’s website diaries of the shambolic struggles of their early years could make a vivid volume. “At the time, we had desperation on our side,” he says. “It was either figure out a way to make this work or go back to working in a restaurant for the rest of my life. If I was good at working in a restaurant, it’d be one thing, but I was, like, the world’s worst line cook. I was like a Jerry Lewis movie in the kitchen, and a Steve Martin movie when I was waiting tables.

“But I do know how to write a song, and I think I know how to deliver a song I write, and during the course of doing this, we’ve kind of figured out how to do the other parts that go with it.”

A Blessing and a Curse is out now; Drive-By Truckers’ UK tour starts on Saturday at the Academy 2, Manchester

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