Oregon’s Blind Pilot combines lush West Coast indie pop and elegant folk-rock to create a sound that’s both intimate and panoramic. Emerging in 2005, the band found mainstream success in 2011 with the release of their Billboard-charting sophomore effort, We Are the Tide (2011), and elicited acclaim for 2016’s And Then Like Lions, which reached the upper echelons of multiple Billboard charts. An eight-year hiatus preceded the arrival of the band’s fourth long-player, 2024’s In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain.

Blind Pilot was founded in Portland in 2005 by singer/guitarist Israel Nebeker and drummer Ryan Dobrowski, who first banded together in college before combining their talents and touring the northwestern Oregon circuit. By 2006, however, they’d decided that a change of scenery might help their songwriting. Blind Pilot consequently relocated 90 miles north, where the duo spent three months inside an Astoria warehouse while recording demos for a full-length album. Afterward, Nebeker and Dobrowski launched a “bike tour” that saw them traveling from Vancouver to San Francisco on their bicycles, playing shows and selling EPs (not to mention saving gas money) along the way. They returned home to finalize their 3 Round and a Sound debut, which was released by Expunged Records in June 2008.

While playing shows supporting 3 Round and a Sound‘s release, Blind Pilot added four new members to the touring lineup. This swelled the band’s sound, making 2011’s acclaimed We Are the Tide a more fleshed-out, lush affair. The group then signed with ATO for their third LP, which would be five years in the making. Still operating as a six-piece, they released And Then Like Lions in the summer of 2016. The LP cracked the Top Ten on the Billboard alternative, folk, indie, and rock charts. Artistic crises marred Nebeker in the years to come, with a particularly sinister bout of writer’s block driving him to desperate measures. After reading, therapy, and writer’s trips failed, he challenged himself to compose the band’s long-gestating fourth album in a single month. Produced with sonic heft by Josh Kaufman, the resulting In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain was released in 2024.