Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros is a 10-piece musical ensemble founded in 2007 during the yearlong recording of their first album, Up From Below. Disillusionment with his major label experience with Ima Robot drove founding singer-songwriter Alex Ebert to maintain a DIY recording ethos. Considering pioneers of the folk-pop revival, the band’s self-produced albums have experienced some popular success (plus one platinum song, “Home”).

It is the band’s live shows, however, that have seen them celebrated by fans and critics alike. Often likened to “a religious experience,” many of their live shows have taken place in unusual venues (cathedrals, circus tents, underground train depots – even off of trains themselves, as seen in their Grammy-winning documentary Big Easy Express). Their shows are performed without set lists and their songs usually undergo spontaneous improvisation, with Ebert spending a portion of the show singing amongst the crowd.

The band’s 4th studio album PersonA was released on April 15th, 2016. Recording the music almost entirely in one room together in New Orleans, their approach was a far cry from their ramshackle, come-one-come-all production audible on recordings of their previous albums. “We seem to be done for now with distractions from the music itself, the bones of it,” says Ebert. This album also marks the first /me that the band has jointly collaborated on a majority of the songwriting.

The band’s members are Mark Noseworthy, Orpheo McCord, Josh Collazo, Christian Letts, Nico Aglietti, Mitchell Yoshida, Christopher Richard, Stewart Cole, and Alex Ebert.