Is Country Radio Ready for The War and Treaty?

When The War and Treaty release their new album, Plus One, next month, it’ll include some songs they wrote specifically with country radio airplay in mind.

“We intentionally created songs on this album as our gift to country radio,” one half of the husband-and-wife duo, Michael Trotter, tells Taste of Country. “Not so much [like] ‘Hey, play me’ but more so, like, ‘This is my interpretation of the space we could fill in that world.'”

Michael and his wife, Tanya Trotter, have hit a lot of success benchmarks in the mainstream world over the past few years, but radio isn’t one of them.

“We’ve never been played by terrestrial radio, mainstream radio,” Michael points out.

And it’s not that radio hasn’t noticed they’re there — the duo has performed on major awards show stages and been nominated in categories, toured and released music extensively. They spent years as one of the biggest names of the Americana scene.

But they’ve also heard feedback from industry members that their music isn’t “radio-friendly.”

That term has always been a little vague, but in 2025, “radio-friendly” is all but meaningless. During the genre’s bro-country years, there was a formula — trucks, beer, girls — but country music has increasingly opened its doors to outsiders like Post Malone, Jelly Roll, Zach Bryan and Shaboozey. All of those artists have found success with comparatively experimental sounds, and radio has supported them.

Read More: The War and Treaty Explain Their ‘Poetic’ Jelly Roll Connection

The War and Treaty’s music blends soul and blues, using the male-female duet as its foundation, and it’s true that their style is sonically different than much of what’s on the radio. But in an ever-expanding genre landscape where outsider artists are some of the radio’s biggest stars, it’s increasingly difficult to believe that style is the duo’s biggest barrier.

They tend to take the criticism as a friendly challenge. “When someone says that we don’t have anything that sounds radio-ready, it makes us wanna go and find out what they mean. And work harder,” Michael says.

You’ll hear the results of that on the new album. “[We’re] very excited to be able to release this to country radio and see if they think we’re good enough now,” he continues.

But radio airplay or lack thereof isn’t always about whether the music is “good enough,” and the War and Treaty know that. Michael allows that that descriptor can be a catch-all “scapegoat” for programmers who don’t want to play them, for reasons entirely unrelated to their music.

“Sometimes the powers that be are hiding behind that analogy to say, ‘We don’t believe you belong here,'” he notes.

In our interview, he never used the word “racism.” But that’s an undercurrent in The War and Treaty’s story, and a constant in the broader conversation about inequality in country radio airplay.

Back in 2021, the duo performed with Dierks Bentley at the ACM Awards, marking their first mainstream country music awards show performance. While doing interviews at the event, one reporter made a quippy comment on Michael’s black cowboy hat, asking, “Who taught you to wear that hat, your buddy Dierks?”

“What I said was, ‘No, my father taught me to wear this hat,'” Michael remembers. His reply had a gentle — but serious — tone.

Assumptions about their country bona fides are one of many instances of discrimination Black artists face in the genre. Not long after Michael had his hat questioned at the ACMs, he says he saw Chapel Hart‘s Danica Hart receive online criticism for wearing her white cowboy hat backwards while taking photos at an industry event. (Some in the country community don’t like the look of a backwards hat, or think it makes the wearer look like they’re new to the country lifestyle.)

“What they didn’t know was, someone spilled something on the front of her hat. Her white hat had barbecue sauce on it,” Michael recounts. “And she didn’t have another outfit, so she turned it around to do the interview.”

But even though the genre has sometimes questioned their authenticity, The War and Treaty are staying open-hearted. After all, like any other artist who grew up country, Michael and Tanya Trotter have always dreamed about hearing their songs on the radio one day.

“Every artist, if they’re being honest with themselves, they get into the game with three big hoop dreams,” Michael explains. “One, to be discovered. Two, to get a record deal. Three, to be played on the radio.”

The War and Treaty are two for three: They know that final benchmark is, to a large degree, out of their hands — but they haven’t stopped dreaming.

“If country radio decides to play anything from this album, we’d be grateful and we’d be excited,” Michael sums up. “Because we believe that we’re on our way to something bigger and something more destined, that we can’t really control, which is radio.”

The songs on Plus One show that The War and Treaty have done their part to build that bridge from their music to the genre’s mainstream. Now, it’s their turn to issue a friendly challenge.

Your move, country radio.