Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers Are Done Stompin’

Take a peek around the current pop landscape, and you’ll notice the persistent, surprising influence of two 2012 albums. No, it’s not some combination of Taylor Swift’s career-defining Red, nor Kendrick Lamar’s opus good kid, m.A.A.d city, nor Frank Ocean’s breakthrough Channel Orange, all of which came out that year. Instead, these days it can feel like the two most influential albums of 2012 are, for better or worse, Mumford & Sons’ Babel and the Lumineers self-titled debut. Both records jump-started an early-mid aughts pop moment that resulted in Mumford & Sons smuggling banjo onto the Top 40 and spawning sound-alike hits, Kesha bringing harmonica riffs to the top of the charts and Icelandic bands shouting “hey!…hey!” in 7x-platinum blockbusters. 

That moment pales in comparison to the current Gen-Z folk-pop craze, as superstars like Noah Kahan and Zach Bryan fill football stadiums with their acoustic guitar. Both dig Mumford & Sons and have collaborated with the Lumineers while citing them as a foundational influence (“You’re my Tom Petty, bro,” Bryan once told Lumineers’ singer Wesley Schultz). The major labels appear hellbent on replicating their success, with an entire crop of young male next-gen strummers packaged in Kahan and Bryan’s image—Cameron Whitcomb, Adrien Nunez, Sam Barber, to name a few — all gaining streaming momentum over the past year.

These days, everything’s coming up Lumineer. British balladeer Myles Smith scored a global hit last year with “Stargazing,” which sprinkles roots-pop touchstones — kickdrums, hand-claps, fast-paced acoustic strumming, anonymous backup vocalists shouting the word “hey!”—throughout. Last year’s biggest hit, by far, was “Tipsy (Bar Song),” which begins with a folksy, Edward Sharpe-ian whistle and which Shaboozey himself has said was inspired by the Lumineers. Nearly half of the dozen acts with the biggest Billboard-charting all-genre hits of 2024 either covered, collaborated or are in some way affiliated with the Lumineers, including Taylor Swift, who spent her Red tour covering their biggest hit. When Beyoncé kicked off her country-inspired Cowboy Carter with “Texas Hold ‘Em,” many listeners heard a different influence lurking behind the single: yes, the Lumineers. 

It’s no surprise, then, that both Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers are back with new music. The two bands are typically credited with popularizing the early aughts wave of what’s since come to be regarded by a series of semi-derogatory descriptors, most of them involving the word “stomp”: folk-stomp, stomp and holler, “stomp clap hey.”  Even if neither band has never seemed too excited to rehash their heyday, their respective new albums might’ve marked a triumphant claiming of the folk-stomp throne that’s now rightfully theirs, now that the sound they mainstreamed is more popular than ever. Instead, both new records feel like deliberate rejections of a label they never asked for in the first place.

Rushmere, Mumford & Sons’ first record in seven years, is a mostly moody statement of spiritual searching (“There is Christ in the ground beneath your feet,” Marcus Mumford practically whispers on “Monochrome.”) Compared to their last two albums, 2018’s stately Delta and 2015’s National-inflected Wilder Mind, the group seems slightly more willing to indulge flashes of their trademark formula on a pair of could-be hits: the feel-good sing-along “Caroline” and the title track, which contains the band’s signature banjo thrust. Some of that could be their choice of co-producer: Dave Cobb, the Nashville aughts Americana guru who spent the last decade seizing the newly commercial potential of roots-adjacent music that Mumford & Sons helped manifest. 

But for the most part, the 25% smaller group sound more comfortable pleading and pondering on dark, understated ballads like “Blood on the Page” and “Where it Belongs.” When they resort, just once, to literal stomps and claps on the clunky blues-rocker “Truth,” it sounds like a band intentionally self-sabotaging when faced with the weight of outside expectations (the group is seemingly in on the joke: Rushmere credits even specify which five men provided the “stomps” on the song). 

Automatic, the recently released album from the Lumineers, a band so quietly massive it’s spending the upcoming summer playing baseball stadiums, is even more brooding than Rushmere. Their fifth LP is heavy on minor chords, gloomy piano and middle-aged malaise. Automatic is a collection of bummed-out vignettes from bandmates Jeremiah Fraites and Wesley Schultz, who offer clunky social commentary on “Automatic” (“Driving your electric cars/Eating at the salad bars”), devote an entire song, much like Parker Posey’s White Lotus character, to Ativan, and compose choruses about “watching porn and real estate” on “Better Day.” 

We’re a long way from the first Obama administration, but it’s hard to ignore the similarities between the moment Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers are reentering as revered elder statesmen and the one that manifested their rise. The early 2010’s folk-stomp boom came during the post-recession years, as economically-unstable millennials turned to music marketed as authentic just as social media became an everyday part of their lives (“We used to live on Instagram,” Florida Georgia Line sang on their belated 2019 stomp-clap knockoff “Simple”). The Gen-Z folk-stomp boom arose, meanwhile, in the post-pandemic years of excessive inflation during the latter half of the Biden administration in the face of the rise of world-disintegrating generative AI (Kahan makes the connection himself when he alludes to the 2008 stock market crash in 2022’s “Come Over.”)

The Mumford days of yore coincided with the full-fledged rise of the Tea Party; Kahan and Bryan came to prominence in the years that fomented the full-blown reactionary authoritarianism in which we’re now living. In the early 2010’s, it felt like every artist dressed up like Depression-era train-hoppers; These days, it feels like every artist is cowboy cosplaying (while right wing figures dress like early aughts hipsters). Both then and now, Nashville’s Music Row tried to co-opt the folk-stomp movement to their own ends. The two periods feel so intertwined that when comedian Kyle Gordon released his note-perfect folk-stomp satire “We Will Never Die” last month, the song worked just as well as a parody of 2025 as its more obvious target: 2013. 

The 2010’s folk-stomp boom also bore quite a bit in common with the era’s other mass pop phenomenon: EDM. Both genres were built around the drop; Mumford & Sons offered a way to provide the ecstasy of that sonic release with a banjo and a kickdrum. No one understood this better than Avicii, who pivoted in 2013 towards hybrid Americana-EDM on hits like “Hey Brother” and “Wake Me Up.” In the last few years, mainstream dance music stars have, once again, globbed onto rootsier sounds: Diplo donned a cowboy hat and a country alter-ego while Calvin Harris started singing knock-off folk-pop.

The opening song on the Lumineers’ latest album gestures at the disorienting déjà vu of today’s folk-stomp moment with a not so subtle message: a chugging drum beat starts off the first song, which, at first, appears to follow the classic slow-building folk-stomp formula: Halfway through the first verse, a gently-thumping acoustic guitar is added to the mix, followed by piano. But instead of erupting into a triumphant anthemic chorus, the arrangement is never unleashed from its cage. The roots-drop never quite comes. Instead, Schultz lands on an uneasy chorus in which he repeats the same three words over and over again: same old song. The folk-stomp party rages on, but the hosts are looking for the door.

From Rolling Stone US.