Cage the Elephant

They had to move to London to get anyone in America to give a shit. It was 2008 and the Shultz brothers were broke, living in a cramped flat, and recording their debut with Jay Joyce while trying to figure out if they were a punk band or a blues-rock revival act. That first record is raw because they didn't have the budget to be anything else. It’s twitchy, paranoid, and sounds like a group of Kentucky kids realizing that the UK press was actually going to buy what they were selling. By the time Melophobia hit in 2013, they stopped trying to impress the NME and started listening to their own weird instincts. They scrapped an entire album's worth of material because it felt like they were just mimicking their idols. That’s the moment they turned into a real band. They stopped chasing the 'indie-rock' tag and started making music that sounded like a fever dream in a thrift store. Not everything since has been a home run—Social Cues can feel a bit too polished for its own good—but they’ve stayed in the game by refusing to make the same record twice.

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