Umphrey's McGee

Umphrey's McGee enters its second decade together with their hardest, darkest, and most artistically cohesive album to date.



Mantis is the first Umphrey's album to consist entirely of material never previously performed on the road, where the band rules the improv-rock circuit and plays more than 100 shows each year. Although the band already plays numerous songs they have yet to record, sometimes you just have to hold back in order to deliver a bigger bang. Mystique, thy name is Mantis.



Virtuosos and connoisseurs of The Riff, Umphrey's has concocted a visual grammar of hand signals and body language to toss musical ideas back and forth during the experimental "Jimmy Stewart" improvisations that punctuate their three-hour shows. Mantis likewise began at riff level, when many of the band members presented each other with CDs containing hundreds of riffs they'd composed over the past dozen years. The best of these were painstakingly displaced, modulated, and shifted about like Lego blocks, growing from rough drafts into the elegant and emotionally fulfilling tracks on Mantis.



Founded in 1997 in the shadows of the Golden Dome of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, Umphrey’s McGee soon made Chicago home base, and set their sights on becoming one of the premier live acts in today’s touring circuit. Over the course of the last ten years, the band has headlined festivals such as Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza, and continues to sell out shows in the nation’s premier venues coast to coast.