Emerging from Providence, Rhode Island in 2006, the Low Anthem took shape as an eclectic project that moved through traditional roots influences, conceptual psych-rock, and atmospheric folktronica. Brown University students Ben Knox Miller and Jeff Prystowsky, who also worked as late-night DJs at the campus radio station, applied their classical composition training to shape a distinctive Americana sound incorporating gospel, folk, and blues. Jocie Adams came aboard the following year, prompting the group to expand its instrumental resources to include World War I pump organs and crotales. The band made its independent debut with 2007’s What the Crow Brings, then spent early 2008 on remote Block Island—twelve miles off the Rhode Island coast—recording with producer Jesse Lauter; the resulting sessions yielded Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, initially issued by the band itself.
Continued momentum led the Low Anthem to sign with Nonesuch Recordings, which reissued Oh My God in 2009 and supported the album with appearances at summer festivals. Multi-instrumentalist Mat Davidson (Twain) joined later that year and, one month afterward, traveled with the group to Central Falls, Rhode Island, to track a third album inside an abandoned pasta sauce factory. Over three months the band utilized the building’s resonant spaces to create Smart Flesh, released in February 2011 on Bella Union, where it entered the Billboard 200. Davidson subsequently departed, and in 2012 the remaining members supplied the soundtrack for the American film Arcadia.
In 2013 the Low Anthem relocated, characteristically, to an abandoned opera house to begin work on the successor to Smart Flesh. With Adams exiting during this period to focus on her own project, Arc Iris, the resulting Eyeland appeared on Washington Square Music in 2016. The ambitious, narrative-driven conceptual album merged folk, psychedelic rock, and experimental elements. While touring in support, the band suffered a van accident that caused injuries and destroyed numerous instruments. Miller, who avoided serious harm, spent the next two weeks in his bedroom using available equipment to demo material for the Low Anthem’s fifth studio album. After Prystowsky recovered, the quieter, more reflective concept album inspired by a Buddhist fable, The Salt Doll Went to Measure the Depth of the Sea, was completed and issued by Joyful Noise in early 2018.
