Punch Brothers, the Grammy-winning string quintet founded by mandolinist Chris Thile, will bring its newest and strangest project yet to La Jolla when the band performs at UC San Diego's Epstein Family Amphitheater on Oct. 9. The show arrives on the heels of The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers, the group's seventh album and its first made up entirely of instrumental music.
Thile formed the band in 2006, and the current lineup pairs him with guitarist Chris Eldridge, bassist Paul Kowert, banjoist Noam Pikelny, and violinist Brittany Haas, according to UC San Diego's amphitheater listing. The group has picked up multiple honors over the years, including a Grammy for Best Folk Album for its 2018 record All Ashore, per the same listing. The venue is located at 9480 Innovation Lane in La Jolla, and a ticketing page from UCSD's ArtPower series lists the performance for 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 9, though that listing carries lower confidence than other event details.
A First Fully Instrumental Record
The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers dropped July 24 on Nonesuch Records, and it marks a real departure for a band that has always paired virtuosic string-band playing with lyrics. As Nonesuch Records describes it, the album is the seventh from the Grammy-winning band and its first comprising all instrumental tunes. It contains eight new original compositions alongside three traditional songs the band arranged itself, the label notes.
The record is also notable as the first Punch Brothers album to feature Haas, who joined the quintet in 2023. Per the same Nonesuch account, the band itself has framed the shift to instrumental-only music as possibly the boldest turn it has taken yet. Bandcamp materials describing the album quote Rolling Stone's characterization of the band's sound as a blend of bluegrass, roots, rock, pop, jazz, and classical influences, per Punch Brothers' Bandcamp page, which also lists the album's recording dates as September and December of 2025 at a Vermont studio.
A Growing Regional Venue
According to UC San Diego Today, the Epstein Family Amphitheater seats about 2,500 guests and was built to expand arts offerings for students, faculty, staff and the general public. Its debut included two weeks of programming for thousands of campus and community members, ranging from San Diego Symphony performances to a festival focused on Black contributions to electronic music. For evening events, the venue's visitor guide says the amphitheater is located off the UC San Diego Blue Line Trolley at the Central Campus Station.
Part of the Band's Biggest Tour in Years
The La Jolla stop is one node in what has been described as Punch Brothers' most extensive touring stretch since 2019. A performance listing from the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium characterizes the band's stop there as part of that broader run. Nonesuch's announcement adds that the underlying U.S. tour spans 28 cities and kicked off May 14.
According to the original reporting on the band's UCSD appearance from Times of San Diego, bassist Paul Kowert has spoken about how the new album came together without words. Kowert has said Thile simply did not feel like writing lyrics for this batch of songs, and that the ideas behind the record were not easily communicable with language in the first place. Kowert has also described the band's music as diverse, and has framed the concert itself as an invitation for audiences to join in on what he calls a wild adventure, per the Times of San Diego account.
A Band Built From Bluegrass Pedigree
The current members bring deep résumés to the stage. Kowert, who joined Punch Brothers in 2008, studied classical music with bassist Edgar Meyer at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, per the Times of San Diego's reporting. Haas, who plays fiddle, previously performed alongside Kowert in the group Hawktail and was also a member of the band Crooked Still before joining Punch Brothers.
The current lineup reflects some turnover over the band's two-decade run. Violinist Gabe Witcher departed the group in 2023 to focus on film and television music and arrangements for other artists, while original bassist Greg Garrison left after the band's first record, according to the same reporting. Thile, for his part, also hosted the public radio program Live From Here from 2016 to 2020, and the band reportedly developed some of the new album's material while working on a podcast called Energy Curfew Music Hour, which has a format similar to that earlier radio show. Writing sessions for the record took place at an Airbnb in either Vermont or upstate New York, per the Times of San Diego.
The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers includes eight original compositions and three traditional songs arranged by the band. San Diego audiences will hear how that fully instrumental repertoire translates live when Punch Brothers takes the Epstein Family Amphitheater stage next month.
