Origins

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British-American trio Raynes have wasted no time making themselves heard. Signing with Sony Music Publishing less than a year after their inception, the group has since released six singles and two EPs and performed at sold-out venues across the US and the UK. Now, their singular blend of pop, folk, and world music is being featured on television shows, commercials, and tastemakers’ playlists, earning them hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners and millions of streams across platforms.

Mat Charley and Joe Berger, both born and raised in North Dakota, met in college, where Mat––the band’s producer and multi-instrumentalist––was usually skipping class to write songs.

“Joe introduced himself to me because I ‘looked cool,’ as he put it, and off-handedly mentioned that he played guitar. Within a week or so we were spending most nights in my room working on songs,” recalls Mat. Before long, the two had recorded a handful of demos and realized that the songs were good enough to build a band around.

Knowing that they would need a strong vocalist, they took to the internet to find the missing piece of their project. “We were looking for a needle in an enormous haystack,” says Mat. “To be honest, we didn’t think our chances were very good at all.”

After months of searching, they finally struck gold when they came across a video of Mark Race, a native of Durham, UK. “We loved everything about him––his look, his voice, his guitar playing, he was the whole package. We didn’t think there was any way he would actually be willing to drop everything and fly across the ocean to be in a band with us,” reveals Joe.

But just ten days later, after a Facebook message and a few phone calls, Mark was on a flight to LA to meet Mat and Joe.

“It was a big risk for me, for sure, but it was really a risk for all of us,” admits Mark. “We all come from pretty different musical backgrounds, and none of us were sure at the beginning if we would even be on the same page creatively.”

But the trio’s differences have proven to be a winning combination. As Raynes, they combine their diverse influences to form a group whose taste spans the globe, incorporating elements of folk, Americana, and baroque pop with Celtic and world music to create a wholly original sound. “We’re musical omnivores,” they state. “There are so many instruments and sounds and traditions in the world, and we just want to explore as much as we can.”

For a band with such an eclectic sonic appetite, assigning a genre to Raynes can be a challenge. “We tend to build a lot of our songs on acoustic guitars and pianos, but once we start adding synths and accordions and dulcimers the whole concept of genre sort of goes out the window,” says Mark. “The closest we’ve come to defining our sound is just calling it ‘expensive folk.’”

Even with the band’s refusal to limit themselves to the boundaries of any particular genre, there are certain unmistakable hallmarks of a Raynes song: a soaring ear-worm of a chorus, usually supported by multi-part vocal harmonies; richly layered acoustic instrumentation; thunderous percussion; and, more often than not, the sound of something surprising––a bouzouki, perhaps, or a harmonium, or an ensemble of djembes and taikos. The subject matter of their songs is as expansive as their sonic palette, ranging from the classic (love, loneliness, regret) to the unorthodox (mental illness, Samson and Delilah, the London Blitz of WWII), and their lyrics are insightful, affecting, and keenly honed.

Raynes’ latest project, a five-song EP entitled ‘49, was released in November, 2024. Inspired by the American gold rush of 1849, the EP employs this historical event as the backdrop against which the songs are set. For Raynes, this thematic concept shares many similarities with their own journey as a band—leaving their hometowns and loved ones, traveling across the globe, and enduring the risks and uncertainties of the music industry as they try to stake their own claim and “strike gold.”