The Shins Tickets

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Short Biography

The Shins
July 2012 Australian tour, with special guests Husky.
Handsome Tours are Very Excited to announce the welcome return of their old friends The Shins to Australia this July. Armed with new material from their acclaimed fourth album Port Of Morrow, the band will perform at Splendour In The Grass, plus headline shows at Festival Hall in Melbourne and the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney.
It's been a busy start to the year for the Portland based five piece, with the band currently in the midst of an extensive US tour to celebrate the release of Port Of Morrow. The album has been five years in the making, following on from their 2007 LP Wincing The Night Away, and was recorded throughout 2011 with band leader James Mercer handling all songwriting duties, lead vocals and the majority of instrumentation.
The Shins formed in 1996, when Mercer began writing what would eventually become the bands first record. Their first single ‘Nature Bears A Vacuum' was released with no expectations, however it generated enough attention that at a performance supporting Modest Mouse in 2000, Sub Pop's Jonathan Poneman asked the band to contribute to the label's ‘Single of the Month Club'. This relationship eventually extended to Sub Pop releasing the bands 2001 single ‘New Slang', and their debut album Oh, Inverted World. It received critical acclaim for its lyrically deft and jangly pop sound, with several songs featuring prominently on the soundtrack for the 2004 film Garden State, exposing the music of The Shins to a much wider audience.
Their sophomore record Chutes Too Narrow was released in the fall of 2003 to much fanfare in indie music circles, exploring new genres, song structures, and levels of production fidelity. The band's third album, Wincing the Night Away, was recorded during 2006 by a largely solo Mercer. It debuted at number 2 in the US, the highest chart position Sub Pop has ever achieved. Port of Morrow was released in March 2012, having so far stemmed the singles ‘Simple Song' and ‘The Rifle's Spiral'.
This tour will mark The Shins' fifth visit to our shores since 2003. In fact, the band are so fond of Australia they named one of their pop gems after our fine country! Very special guests for both the Melbourne and Sydney shows will be the warm, harmony soaked sounds of Melbourne quartet Husky.
"Port of Morrow doesn't sound like it belongs to any particular decade or style, instead hopping around like some fully loaded AM radio dial that cranks out gem after gem." Pitchfork

In-depth Biography
A classic guitar pop group almost nine years in the making, Albuquerque, New Mexico's the Shins began in 1997 as the side project of singer/songwriter and guitarist James Mercer's primary band, Flake. Mercer formed Flake in 1992 with drummer Jesse Sandoval, keyboardist Marty Crandall, and bassist Neal Langford; they eventually changed their name to Flake Music, releasing several singles, a well-received album, When You Land Here, It's Time to Return, and touring with friends like Modest Mouse and Califone.

Soon after the release of When You Land Here, Mercer and Sandoval formed the Shins as a change of pace, playing as a duo with Cibo Matto and the American Analog Set. With Mercer as the Shins' primary songwriter, the group developed a more focused, crafted sound than Flake Music's charming, if somewhat rambling, collaborative style. Crandall, as well as Scared of Chaka's Dave Hernandez and Ron Skrasek, filled out the Shins' lineup; however, Hernandez and Skrasek left after a short while, due to the success of their main project. By 1999, Flake Music essentially disbanded and Langford also joined the Shins.

With a couple of 7"s on Omnibus -- 1998's Nature Bears a Vacuum and 2000's When I Goose-Step -- under their belts, the Shins embarked on a tour with Modest Mouse. Sub Pop's Jonathan Poneman caught the San Francisco date of the tour and asked the Shins to contribute a single to the label's Single of the Month Club, which eventually became an offer to release their 2001 single New Slang and their debut album, Oh, Inverted World. The group spent the rest of the year touring with acts such as Preston School of Industry and Red House Painters. The release of singles such as "Know Yr Onion!" and "The Past and the Pending" kept the Shins' success going into 2002, cementing Oh, Inverted World as one of the definitive indie rock albums of the early 2000s and the Shins as one of the style's definitive bands.

By the time the band recorded their second album, Chutes Too Narrow, Langford was replaced on bass by Dave Hernandez (ex-Scared of Chaka). Chutes Too Narrow was released in fall 2003. The Shins' profile increased drastically the next year when actor Zach Braff included several of their songs in his 2004 movie Garden State with one of the main characters going so far as to proclaim that the song "New Slang" would "change your life." Its follow-up, Wincing the Night Away, appeared in January 2007 and sold over a staggering 100,000 copies in its first week. The Shins had never before hit higher than number 86 on the Billboard charts, but the album's sales snagged the guys a debut spot of number two. This was also a record for Sub Pop itself, as the label had only previously peaked at number 79 with the Afghan Whigs' 1996 album Black Love.

In 2008, the band announced that their contract with Sub Pop was up, and that their next album would be released through Mercer's own Aural Apothecary label. The resulting Port of Morrow, which featured an all new backing band that included fellow songwriters Jessica Dobson and Richard Swift, Modest Mouse drummer Joe Plummer, and Yuuki Matthews from the Crystal Skulls, arrived in March 2012. ~ Heather Phares, Rovi