American folk-rock band The Lumineers will be gracing South African shores at the end of the year for a two-city tour which will see them perform one show in both Cape Town and Jozi.
‘The Lumineers’ are a five-piece band best known for their song, ‘Ho Hey’, which put them in the limelight after the release of their self-titled debut album in 2012.
The band, however, evolved from an initially humble collaboration between frontman Wesley Keith Schultz and drummer Jeremiah Caleb Fraites, who in 2005 started playing small gigs in New York as Wesley Jeremiah.
Struggling under the strain of the high cost of living in New York, Wesley Jeremiah eventually relocated to Denver, Colorado, where they met Neyla Pekarek, who responded to their Craigslist advertisement for a cellist in 2010.
An opportunity to record a full length album came soon after, when independent management company Onto Entertainment fronted them the money to do so after seeing a YouTube video of them playing ‘Ho Hey’ in an apartment. This album went on to sell more than 1 million copies.
The Lumineers use a wide variety of instruments, such as the mandolin, glockenspiel, accordion and upright bass, and have very diverse musical influences which range all the way from Beethoven, Bruce Springsteen, and Talking Heads, to hard rockers Guns N' Roses.
Stelth Ulvang and Ben Wahamaki joined the band in 2012.
The Lumineers will be playing at the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens in Cape Town on 4 December, before heading to Johannesburg for a daytime concert at Emmarentia Dam on 6 December 2014.
Tickets for both these shows cost R465 and available from webticket.co.za.