Punch Brothers

Few bands sit as comfortably between bluegrass and chamber music as Punch Brothers, the American quintet whose line-up centres on Chris Thile's mandolin, Brittany Haas's fiddle, Noam Pikelny's banjo, Chris Eldridge's guitar and Paul Kowert's bass. Critics have pinned their sound somewhere between bluegrass looseness and the discipline of modern classical music. Thile formed the group in 2006 to record an album, and the name they eventually settled on comes from a jingle in a Mark Twain story.

Their debut, Punch, arrived on Nonesuch Records in February 2008 and included Thile's forty-minute suite The Blind Leaving the Blind, first performed at Carnegie Hall the year before. Antifogmatic followed in 2010, and in 2012 Who's Feeling Young Now? brought the song Dark Days into the soundtrack for The Hunger Games. The Phosphorescent Blues (2015) produced Julep, nominated for Best American Roots Song at the 2016 Grammys. All Ashore, released in 2018, won the Grammy for Best Folk Album in 2019, and their latest release, Hell on Church Street (2022), reworks Tony Rice's 1983 album Church Street Blues.