The High Strung

Known for fusing sharp melodic power pop, riff-driven garage rock, and off-kilter humor, Detroit’s the High Strung have operated as a rock & roll unit since the start of the new millennium. Relentless road warriors guided by a punk ethos and an off-center sense of playfulness, the group issued a series of well-received full-lengths across the 2000s and drew wider notice after leaving their battered touring van on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame steps in Cleveland while booking shows exclusively in libraries and staging a singular concert at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba—incidents that later appeared on an episode of This American Life. The 2011 placement of “The Luck You Got” as the theme for Showtime’s Shameless broadened their reach ahead of key later albums such as 2012’s ¿Posible - O - Imposible? and 2014’s I, Anybody. Frontman Josh Malerman’s rising profile as a novelist further enlarged their audience once his horror novel Bird Box reached the screen as a 2018 Netflix feature, paving the way for the band’s eighth LP, Quiet Riots. In late 2021 they finally issued the long-unreleased HannaH.

The group’s origins lie at Michigan State University, where Malerman, drummer Derek Berk, singer/guitarist Mark Owen, and guitarist Jason Berkowitz first assembled in the mid-’90s under the name the Masons. After bassist and longtime associate Chad Stocker joined, they adopted the High Strung moniker in 2000, put out several EPs, and crisscrossed the United States. Once settled in New York they delivered their debut album, These Are Good Times, on Teepee Records in 2003. By then the quartet had already logged hundreds of shows annually. In summer 2004, after their heavily graffitied 1988 Chevy van had accumulated 318,621 miles, Berk drove it onto the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame entrance and left it with a plaque that read in part, “The High Strung’s donation to you is a wild multicolored beast of a vehicle that, despite its age and demand placed upon it, carried us to 500 shows across America without asking us to cancel one.” The remaining members collected him in a second van bound for the next tour date while museum staff towed the vehicle away.

Following Owen’s and Berkowitz’s exits, the High Strung operated as a trio, with Malerman handling all vocals and guitar while Stocker supplied his signature lead-bass lines. Detroit garage veteran Jim Diamond recorded their 2005 LP Moxie Bravo, which earned strong praise from Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard; in addition to their national touring regimen the band performed loud rock sets inside Michigan libraries as part of a librarians’ campaign to refresh the image of library culture. They signed with Park the Van and saw both Get the Guests and a reissue of Moxie Bravo appear in 2007. For their fourth album they ventured into more experimental territory, tracking the psych-pop standout Ode to the Inverse of the Dude in Canada with producer Dave Newfeld. While touring the record in 2009 they accepted an invitation to play for troops at Guantanamo, an atypical booking for a left-leaning outfit known for psychedelic lyrics and idiosyncratic guitar pop.

By the time of their wily, self-produced 2011 album Dragon Dicks the High Strung had returned to Detroit; shortly afterward they expanded back to a quartet with the addition of lead guitarist Stephen Palmer. That same year Shameless chose the 2005 track “The Luck You Got” for its opening credits, boosting the band’s visibility. Palmer’s first recorded appearance came on the robust ¿Posible - O - Imposible? in 2012 and continued on the exploratory I, Anybody in 2014. Malerman’s debut novel, the post-apocalyptic horror story Bird Box, also surfaced that year and brought him widespread recognition. The High Strung played only sporadically in subsequent years as Malerman released additional novels. Netflix issued the Sandra Bullock– and John Malkovich–starring adaptation of Bird Box in December 2018, drawing renewed attention to the group, who followed with Quiet Riots in February 2019—their first album since 2003 to feature returning singer/guitarist Mark Owen, who had rejoined in 2016. Five years later the band exhumed a long-shelved recording. Cut over two weeks in 2002, the full-length HannaH stayed unmixed and unheard for nearly twenty years before its October 2021 release.