Jeff The Brotherhood

Born of fraternal collaboration rather than any member bearing that name, JEFF the Brotherhood emerged from the efforts of Jake and Jamin Orrall, who had previously performed together in Be Your Own Pet. As the offspring of noted songwriter Robert Ellis Orrall, the Nashville-based pair launched the project in 2001 during their high-school years. Blending psychedelic rock, garage, and power-pop elements, they shaped an idiosyncratic, propulsive style that tests the limits of rock while anchoring each piece with a memorable melodic core, at moments suggesting a denser yet leaner counterpart to Cheap Trick. Operating through their independent Infinity Cat imprint, the duo issued a steady stream of recordings that began in 2002 with I Like You and continued with the limited-run releases The Byzantine Empire in 2005, Castle Storm in 2006, and The Boys R Back in Town in 2008. Their 2009 album Heavy Days marked the first project to receive wide distribution and broadened their audience among indie listeners after joint work with Best Coast and Screaming Females.

The year 2011 brought further milestones when the band delivered the live recording Live at Third Man via Jack White’s Third Man Records and issued the studio album We Are the Champions. Their subsequent full-length involved two notable partnerships: sessions with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach and a deal with Warner Bros. that yielded the 2012 release Hypnotic Nights. In 2014 the Orralls issued the EP Dig the Classics, which featured interpretations of songs by My Bloody Valentine, Pixies, and the Wipers. Later that year they returned to the studio with producer Joe Chiccarelli, whose credits include My Morning Jacket and the Strokes, to cut their second Warner Bros. album. Wasted on the Dream featured bassist Jack Lawrence throughout, along with appearances from Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino, Diarrhea Planet’s Evan Bird and Emmett Miller, and Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson.

Following a decisive rupture with the major label, JEFF the Brotherhood declared in February 2015 that they were no longer Warner Bros. artists and brought Wasted on the Dream out on Infinity Cat the following month. Liberated from corporate constraints, they swiftly returned in November with Global Chakra Rhythms, a sprawling, atmospheric double album that revived the lo-fi psychedelic approach of their earliest recordings. That emphasis on foundational sounds persisted with the 2016 release Zone. The band shifted once more toward the unconventional on 2018’s Magick Songs, an expansive concept album drawing inspiration from science-fiction and progressive music of the 1970s and 1980s.