Band of Horses

Out of one band's collapse

Band of Horses started in Seattle in 2004, after Carissa's Wierd — the slow, bleak group Ben Bridwell had drummed for — came apart. The new project was briefly called simply Horses. Its earliest shape put Bridwell on vocals and guitar with bassist Chris Early and drummer Tim Meinig, joined by Mat Brooke, also out of Carissa's Wierd, on guitar and vocals. Sub Pop, the label Bridwell already knew from the Carissa's Wierd years, put out the debut.

That record, Everything All the Time, was made at Avast Studios in Seattle and co-produced by the band with Phil Ek. It arrived on 21 March 2006. Metacritic settled it at 78 out of 100 across 24 reviews; Pitchfork gave it 8.8 and later placed it 109th on its list of the best albums of the 2000s. Commercially it was a slow burn rather than a hit — number 25 on Billboard's Heatseekers chart, number 31 on Independent Albums, number 25 in Norway. Gold certifications followed in the United States, Denmark and Norway.

Brooke left the same year. He had written and sung co-lead on two of the album's ten tracks, "I Go to the Barn Because I Like The..." and "St. Augustine", and both vanished from the live set after his exit. Neither came back until December 2012.

The records, and the one song that outran them

Cease to Begin followed on Sub Pop in 2007 and reached number 35 on the Billboard 200. Infinite Arms, released in 2010 across Columbia, Brown and Fat Possum, went to number 7 in the United States and number 21 in the UK, and brought the band their only Grammy nomination, for Best Alternative Music Album at the 53rd awards in 2011. Mirage Rock came in 2012 through Kobalt, Why Are You OK in 2016 via Interscope and American Recordings, and Things Are Great in 2022 on BMG. In January 2024 the band released Acoustic at the Ryman Vol. 2, a second live acoustic set recorded at the Nashville hall.

One song has travelled further than any of the albums. "The Funeral", the debut's lead single, has been licensed across film, television, video games and advertising to the point where it is better known than the record it came from. It is certified double platinum in the United States, has been sampled by Kid Cudi, and was given a dance remix by the producer Gryffin in 2025. Twenty years on, it is the song most of the room is waiting for, and the band now plays it sixth from the start because that is where the album puts it.

One constant, a changing band

Bridwell is the only member who has been there throughout. The sharpest break came in May 2017, when guitarist Tyler Ramsey and bassist Bill Reynolds, both in the band since 2007, announced they were leaving; Bridwell later disputed their version of events and said they had been fired. Richard Fitzpatrick covered guitar briefly in 2017, Ian MacDougall held the role from 2017 to 2022, and Matt Gentling — who had played with the band before — returned on bass in 2017 and has stayed.

The current five are Bridwell on vocals, guitar, pedal steel and keyboards; Creighton Barrett, on drums since 2005 and the longest-serving member after Bridwell; Gentling on bass and backing vocals; Brett Nash on lead guitar since 2022; and Joel Graves, who joined on keyboards and guitar in 2026, in time for the anniversary run.

The reissue

Sub Pop announced an expanded twentieth-anniversary edition of Everything All the Time on 12 January 2026 and released it on 20 March. The main album was stretched to 19 tracks, with a further LP of bonus material: the band's 2005 tour EP, previously unreleased studio and live recordings, a demo of "The Funeral" and a track that had been used on The O.C. The digital version carries extras that do not fit the physical formats. Everything was remastered, with new sleeve notes from Ek, who wrote that two decades on he still thinks the record is the thing it set out to be. North American vinyl pre-orders got metallic gold; UK and European pre-orders got opaque yellow in a gatefold.

The set also prised loose a previously unreleased song, "(Biding Time Is a) Boat to Row", written around the story of the 52-hertz whale, with a video starring the actor Josh Whitehouse. Bridwell's own line on the reissue was short: the album made all of his dreams come true, and he remains grateful for the desperation that fuelled it.

Reviewing the edition for Spectrum Culture on 25 March 2026, Kevin Korber picked out "Part Two" for its murky, dreamlike quality and "Worry Song" as a signpost towards where the band went next, and argued that the record's pull goes past nostalgia — one listen explains why it caused a stir in a crowded year for guitar bands.

A year built on an anniversary, not a new record

The run-up came from outside the band. In September 2025 Bridwell released Making Good Time, a five-track covers EP with Iron & Wine's Sam Beam, cut in North Carolina with Brad Cook and his house band. It took on U2, Foreigner, Roxy Music, boygenius and Kendrick Lamar and SZA's "Luther", and followed Sing into My Mouth, the pair's first covers project from 2015. Bridwell and Beam are childhood friends who swapped mixtapes; a co-headlining tour followed the EP.

Then came the anniversary, which has run all year in four separate blocks. The spring headlining leg ran from 9 April to 2 May 2026, opening in Portland, Maine and finishing in Columbia, Missouri, with three Seattle shows clustered around the reissue's release date. A summer co-headlining run with Dinosaur Jr went from 10 July in Kingston, New York to 1 August in Omaha, with Dinosaur Jr playing 1993's Where You Been in full every night — the band's third co-headlining tour in two years, after City & Colour and Iron & Wine. In September the schedule picked up with Borderland Music and Arts Festival in East Aurora, New York on the 13th.

The European leg is the current one. It began on 25 September at Annexet in Stockholm and moved through Oslo, Trondheim, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Cologne before the UK dates: two nights at O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire on 7 and 8 October, Albert Hall in Manchester on the 10th, Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow on the 12th, O2 Academy Leeds on the 13th and O2 Academy Bristol on the 14th. It then returns to the continent for Groningen, Berlin, Munich and Barcelona, closing at La Riviera in Madrid on 22 October.

The final leg, on sale since 15 May, is North American and runs 10 November at the Roseland Theater in Portland, Oregon through San Francisco's Regency Ballroom, two Los Angeles nights on 13 and 14 November, Phoenix, Tucson, Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Houston, ending with two shows at Charleston Music Hall on 25 and 27 November. No new studio album has been announced; the reissue and the touring around it have taken the whole year.

Two sets and no support

The headline shows are billed as An Evening With Band of Horses, and the billing is literal: no opening act, and two sets. The first is Everything All the Time played straight through in album order. The second is drawn from everywhere else, which means it changes night to night — a structure that rewards repeat attendance and makes the two-night stands in London, Los Angeles and Charleston less of a duplicate than they look.

On the summer co-headline dates the arrangement was different. Dinosaur Jr went on first — at 8.15pm in Davenport, Iowa on 30 July — and J Mascis then came back out during Band of Horses' set to play on "In a Drawer", the Why Are You OK track he had guested on in the studio. At the opening night of Hellbender, the Orange Peel's new outdoor venue in Asheville on 19 July, thunder and lightning pushed the queues back before Dinosaur Jr worked through Where You Been and a cover of The Cure's "Just Like Heaven"; the review of that night put Bridwell's singing against the weight Nash and Gentling add behind him, and noted Mascis joining for "In a Drawer" before the close.