Peter Buck spent 31 years defining jangly American guitar rock with R.E.M. before the band called it quits in 2011. Now the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame guitarist is touring with a very different kind of band, one that folds Indian sitar, Arabic oud, Indonesian gamelans and Brazilian surdo drums into its sound, and it is bringing that mix to the Guild Theatre in Menlo Park on September 4.
The band is called Drink the Sea, and it is less a conventional rock act than a rotating collective of veteran musicians who met through decades of touring and session work. Buck, who was born in Berkeley, co-founded R.E.M. in Athens, Georgia, alongside Mike Mills, Michael Stipe and Bill Berry, a lineup that released 15 albums before the group's 31-year run ended in 2011, according to The Press Democrat. R.E.M.'s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came in 2007, its first year of eligibility, an honor that helped cement Buck's reputation as an alternative-rock guitar icon, per the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Drink the Sea traces its roots to 2022, when multi-instrumentalist Alain Johannes and drummer Barrett Martin began jamming together at Martin's studio in Olympia, Washington, before the project grew into a globe-spanning collaboration, according to The Freight. The band's current lineup also includes Duke Garwood, Abby Blackwell and Lisette Garcia alongside Buck, Johannes and Martin, the same report notes.
A Supergroup Built From Grunge and Hard-Rock Pedigree
The players surrounding Buck bring their own heavyweight resumes. Martin won a Latin Grammy Award in 2017 for his production work in Brazil and previously drummed for Seattle grunge bands Screaming Trees and Mad Season, according to Sunyata Records. Johannes, meanwhile, co-founded the 1990s alternative rock group Eleven and has worked as a producer, contributor or touring member for acts including Queens of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures and PJ Harvey, per his own artist biography.
That collective pedigree fed into a prolific run of recording sessions. Drink the Sea tracked its debut material in studios scattered across Iceland, Brazil, Chile, Joshua Tree, Seattle and Spain, ultimately releasing a 22-song double LP across two installments, Drink the Sea I and Drink the Sea II, in late 2025, according to Echo Base. A third album, Drink the Sea III, featuring 12 new tracks, is scheduled for release on October 2 — meaning the Menlo Park stop lands squarely between the two releases.
The band already gave Bay Area audiences a preview of what to expect. Drink the Sea performed at The Freight in Berkeley on February 3, 2026, playing a two-hour-plus set of 26 songs drawn from Drink the Sea I and II, with the concert featuring sitar, oud, gamelans and surdo drums woven through the arrangements, The Press Democrat reports. Photographer Chris Riley captured Buck and his bandmates onstage that night, images that circulated alongside the newspaper's coverage of the show.
A Centennial Season for Menlo Park's Guild Theatre
The September 4 concert at the Guild Theatre starts at 8 p.m., with tickets starting at $64.48, according to the same Press Democrat report. The venue itself carries its own milestone this year: the Guild originally opened on May 6, 1926, as the single-screen Menlo Theatre, making 2026 its 100th anniversary, according to Metro Silicon Valley.
The theater closed as a movie house in 2019 before the non-profit Peninsula Arts Guild poured $35 million into renovating it, reopening the space in February 2022 as an intimate, 500-capacity live music venue, according to Local News Matters. Hoodline covered that transformation at the time in a piece describing the venue's cool new debut. Drink the Sea's visit now folds into the Guild's centennial season, a June-through-November 2026 concert series that has also booked national touring acts including Cat Power, Margo Price, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram and Chris Isaak, per Metro Silicon Valley.
Venues like the Guild carry outsized weight for downtown business corridors and regional arts funding. A National Endowment for the Arts study found U.S. consumers spent $26.5 billion on admissions to performing arts events in 2017, including $3.7 billion specifically on music groups and artists, according to figures cited in the Menlo Park Downtown Market Study. For a 500-seat, non-profit-run stage marking its 100th year, a touring supergroup fronted by a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer represents exactly the kind of booking that milestone programming is built around.
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