Cass McCombs

California to New York

Cass McCombs was born on November 13, 1977 in Concord, California. In the 1990s he played in numerous Bay Area bands before moving to New York City. His first release was the Not the Way E.P. (Monitor and 4AD, 2002), followed by the albums A (2003) and PREfection (2005). He signed to Domino in 2007 and made Dropping the Writ that year. He is listed as a member of The Skiffle Players, and no stable band is documented in the sources we could read.

Catacombs and the Domino years

Catacombs, his fourth full-length, came out on Domino on June 1, 2009 in the UK and July 7 in North America, produced by Ariel Rechtshaid and McCombs. Metacritic scores it 76, Pitchfork gave it 8.2 and named it among its 50 best albums of 2009, and NME gave it 8 out of 10. The Skinny's Gillian Watson called it a musically melancholic but lyrically sharp record. Wit's End and Humor Risk followed in 2011 and Big Wheel and Others in 2013. In 2012 he toured with John Cale and his single "Bradley Manning" premiered on Democracy Now.

He told Stereogum in 2013 that a recording is not a song, and that covers are the highest honor someone can pay you. People really started to appreciate his talents around the time of Catacombs, Stereogum's T. Cole Rachel wrote.

ANTI- and after

Mangy Love (August 26, 2016, ANTI-), Tip of the Sphere (February 8, 2019) and Heartmind (August 19, 2022), his tenth studio album, followed; NME called Mangy Love his richest ever recording. A poetry collection, Toy Fabels, came out on Spurl Editions in 2020, and in 2023 he made an album for children with the schoolteacher Mr. Greg for Smithsonian Folkways. Wikipedia lists Seed Cake on Leap Year (2024) and Interior Live Oak (2025), without labels. His songs have been used in the surf film The Present (2009), Ralph Arlyck's documentary Following Sean and skate videos by Jason Dill, Jerry Hsu and Dylan Rieder. In 2014 he co-headlined a tour with the Meat Puppets.