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About The Lumineers

The Lumineers' story starts in Ramsey, New Jersey in the early 2000s, where teenage friends Wesley Schultz and Josh Fraites began writing songs together; when Josh died of an accidental drug overdose in 2002 at age 19, his younger brother Jeremiah Fraites — then 15 — began playing music with Schultz as a way of processing the grief, and the two kept writing together through the rest of the decade as they worked day jobs in and around New York. By 2009 the duo had decided that the Brooklyn folk scene was saturated, that they could not afford the city, and that a move would force the songs forward; they relocated to Denver, Colorado on the strength of Craigslist apartment listings, recruited classical cellist Neyla Pekarek through a separate Craigslist ad, and began playing the Denver open-mic and small-club circuit (the Meadowlark, the Larimer Lounge, the Bluebird Theater) under the name The Lumineers. They self-released their debut self-titled EP in 2011, signed to Dualtone Records in early 2012 on the strength of a viral live performance of Ho Hey, and released The Lumineers (2012) — anchored by Ho Hey, Stubborn Love, Flowers in Your Hair, Submarines, Big Parade and Slow It Down — to immediate commercial success: the album reached number two on the Billboard 200, sold more than 2.5 million copies in the United States, was Diamond-certified for digital singles on Ho Hey, and earned the band Grammy nominations for Best New Artist and Best Americana Album. Cleopatra followed in April 2016 — Ophelia, Sleep on the Floor, Angela, Cleopatra, Gun Song — debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, topped the chart in the UK and Canada, won the Billboard Music Award for Top Rock Album, and pushed the band into the arena and large-amphitheater tier they have occupied ever since. III, released September 2019, was the conceptual pivot — a ten-song narrative concept album in three chapters following three generations of a fictional family living with addiction, scored by short films directed by Kevin Phillips and featuring Gloria, Donna, Salt and the Sea, Leader of the Landslide and Life in the City. Brightside arrived in January 2022 — the title track, Big Shot, A.M. Radio, WHERE WE ARE — as a leaner, more pop-leaning record that the band built deliberately as a return to the Cleopatra-era live energy. Automatic, the band's fifth studio album, arrived in February 2025 and was supported by the Automatic World Tour that opened in April 2024 (with select early dates around the pre-release single rollout) and ran through arenas and amphitheaters across North America and Europe into 2025. Across the run The Lumineers have sold more than 5 million albums in the United States alone, charted three consecutive top-three Billboard 200 debuts, received four Grammy nominations, and become the rare modern folk-rock act whose audience reliably spans three generations of listeners — parents who heard Ho Hey on adult contemporary radio in 2012, kids who came up on Ophelia and Cleopatra in middle school, and the original Brooklyn-folk scene fans who tracked the band through the III concept-record turn. Schultz and Fraites have remained sober and outspoken about addiction recovery throughout the band's career — Schultz, in particular, has spoken openly in interviews about the loss of Josh Fraites as the central animating event of the songwriting partnership.

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