Southern rock is often reduced to a cliché. Ignorant listeners chide it as malarkey — a bunch of banging around on pots and pans by gun-toting conservatives.

What skeptics miss is that Southern songsmiths are master storytellers and have a seemingly endless vocabulary of hard-rocking, infectious guitar licks that make listeners want to throw back a quart of Jim Beam and start the party.

Drive-By Truckers embody this raucousness, but with a peppering of punk and grotesque Southern Gothicism. Despite party-hearty riffs, their lyrics explore the inherent hardships of Southern life — albums like 2004’s “The Dirty South” regale listeners with haunting verses seemingly written by the ghost of Faulkner. Though they rock harder than any band since Lynyrd Skynyrd, frontman Patterson Hood swears they’re anything but Skynyrd copycats.

“They’re not the big influence most people assume they are,” he said.

Hood said their 2001 magnum opus “Southern Rock Opera” left many critics hailing them as picking up where Skynyrd left off.

“We made a record about growing up in the post-civil rights South,” he said. “The background music for that era was largely arena rock, especially Lynyrd Skynyrd, since they were ubiquitous in [the South] at the time. It was our breakthrough record, so I understand why people tie us to [them].”

Hood was heavily influenced by punk and new wave bands like The Clash that emerged around the same time Skynyrd’s plane crashed in 1977. Additionally, Hood credits Minneapolis legends The Replacements as the impetus for his music career.

“The Replacements were the band that inspired me to drop out of college and form the first band [guitarist] Mike Cooley and I [played in] together 29 years ago,” Hood said. “They’ve been a huge influence on me as a writer. I saw many of their shows — great and terrible — and they definitely had their own spectrum.”

The Truckers also take cues from 1970s Rolling Stones, evident on their new album “English Oceans.” On the opening track, “Shit Shots Count,” Cooley’s sneering vocals are reminiscent of a young Mick Jagger. The two-chord guitar hooks have the same loose cohesion and bear an uncanny resemblance to the Stones’ “Tumbling Dice.”

“There’s definitely a heavier Mick Taylor-era Stones influence than we’ve had in the past,” Hood said. “We’ve certainly all liked those records, but I don’t know why this time it’s more pronounced.”

When Hood sings lead vocals, though, the Truckers’ sound channels Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl.” Hood’s vocals have a guttural, sneering twang without coming across as country, much like Young sans the high nasal styling. “Hanging On,” the ninth track off “English Oceans,” sounds like it could have been the B-side to Young’s “Heart of Gold”; the open guitar strumming is trademark Young, and Hood’s arrow-sharp enunciation pays homage to him as well.

“English Oceans” is the Truckers’ 10th album. Unlike many of their recent albums, it was recorded in a New York minute.

“In the old days, we always cut our records really quickly, usually because we didn’t have money to do it any other way,” Hood said.

That explains why “English Oceans” hearkens back to “Exile on Main Street”-era Stones; its grainy yet polished minimalism is a descendent of the prized outtakes of “Exile.”

“We cut it in about two weeks,” Hood said. “[It’s] a little more stripped down, raw, primal and straightforward than our last four records have been.”

This primal urgency is what draws listeners back to the Truckers time and again. Their encapsulation of raw, live energy is centrifugal on “English Oceans,” and Hood admitted the album was designed in a live format.

The good-time arena rock licks the Truckers live by is key to keeping Southern rock alive and naysayers at bay.

What: Drive-By Truckers
When: 7 p.m. Thursday
Where: First Avenue Mainroom, 701 N. First Ave., Minneapolis
Cost: $22-25
Age: 18+