The Drive-By Truckers started work on their latest album with a monolithic recording session that yielded 25 songs in 25 days. Next came the process of winnowing them to the 13 that made 'The Big To-Do,' the band's ninth studio album.

Picking the right ones wasn't such a difficult task, the band tells Spinner. "It's pretty obvious, really," guitarist/singer Mike Cooley says. "It usually is. At some point, you start finding the corner pieces and the ones with the straight edges first."

For one thing, the Truckers were keen to do something different after 2008's 'Brighter Than Creation's Dark,' a sprawling 19-song, 75-minute record with a lot of stylistic variation.

"We were all ready to follow that up with something a little more full-speed-ahead and hard-charging," singer/guitarist Patterson Hood says.

The result is an album that Hood has described as the hardest-rocking Truckers record since the second disc of 'Southern Rock Opera,' the band's 2001 concept album. Like that release, most of the band's subsequent albums have been set in a particular time and place, but 'The Big To-Do' is rooted more in the present tense.

"We kind of got into a thing of doing that a lot," Hood says of setting the band's albums in different eras. "But I don't want to do that for every record forever. It's like movies: I love movies. Some movies need to be a period piece and they're better, and some movies can be a period piece and still be very much of the right now. Like 'The Godfather,' was very much of '72 even though it was set in the earlier part of the century."

'The Big To-Do' is set for release March 16 on ATO.