We the Kings hail from Bradenton, Florida, the modest Southern locale that also serves as headquarters for Tropicana orange juice. Childhood friends—the quartet even derived its name from their junior high school mascot—singer/guitarist Travis Clark, guitarist Hunter Thomsen, bassist Drew Thomsen, and drummer Danny Duncan assembled the band while still in high school. Manager Bret Disend steered them toward uploading multiple tracks to Purevolume in 2007 to cultivate online momentum, an approach that ultimately yielded a contract with EMI’s S-Curve Records imprint.
Produced by Sam Hollander and mixed by Lou Giordano, both veterans of marketable emo-pop projects, the self-titled debut appeared in October 2007. “Check Yes Juliet” reached the Pop 100 that autumn, after which the band spent the next two years touring alongside the Academy Is... and Hey Monday. They also completed Smile Kid, issued in late 2009, whose Top 100 single “We’ll Be a Dream” featured guest vocals from Demi Lovato.
Heavy touring persisted, including several months opening for All Time Low before the group headlined its own dates across the United States and abroad; these shows carried into 2011 as work began on a third album. Sunshine State of Mind surfaced that summer, documenting the band’s first experiments with pop and hip-hop influences. It was the final release with Drew Thomsen, who was succeeded on bass by Charles Trippy. Keyboardist and rhythm guitarist Coley O’Toole joined in time for the fourth album, Somewhere Somehow, which preceded the 2014 acoustic collection Stripped.
The stylistic progression culminated on 2015’s Strange Love, whose radio-friendly hip-hop textures and disco-tinged “Love Again” moved the sound beyond All-American Rejects territory into OneRepublic and Great Big World territory. A year later the band scored a hit with its cover of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “The Story of Tonight” from the musical Hamilton. In 2018 the aptly named sixth studio album Six arrived, containing the single “On My Love,” while the group spent the summer on the final Vans Warped Tour.
