  Axion-like particles (ALPs) are ubiquitous in models of new physics
explaining some of the most pressing puzzles of the Standard Model. However,
until relatively recently, little attention has been paid to its interplay with
flavour. In this work, we study in detail the phenomenology of ALPs that
exclusively interact with up-type quarks at the tree-level, which arise in some
well-motivated ultra-violet completions such as QCD-like dark sectors or
Froggatt-Nielsen type models of flavour. Our study is performed in the
low-energy effective theory to highlight the key features of these scenarios in
a model independent way. We derive all the existing constraints on these models
and demonstrate how upcoming experiments at fixed-target facilities and the LHC
can probe a vast region of the parameter space, which is currently not excluded
by cosmological and astrophysical bounds. We also emphasize how a future
measurement of the currently unavailable meson decay $D \to \pi +
\rm{invisible}$ could complement these upcoming searches and help to probe a
large unexplored region of their parameter space.
