Explosions in the Sky perform at The Fox Theater in Oakland on Sept. 16, 2019. Joaquin Cabello/STAFF.

This story originally appeared in the Oakland Tribune.

Explosions in the Sky was just a little instrumental band from Texas in early 2004. The band members had their contingent of fans in their home base of Austin and they made their living mostly from their live shows. 

The group — guitarists Mark Smith, Munaf Rayani and Michael James (who also plays bass) and drummer Chris Hrasky — had also experimented with scoring a few films, one of them being “Friday Night Lights,” the story of high school football in a small Texas town. 

After the film came out, the group suddenly began garnering national critical acclaim, which has continued to their new album, “All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone,” which hit stores in late February. 

The band is big enough now to play this weekend’s Coachella Valley Music Festival in Southern California. Fans of Explosions’ cinematic, slowly developing rock with chime-and-echo-laden guitar riffs can also catch the outfit Tuesday at Slim’s in San Francisco. 

The three guitar players in the band all grew up in Midland, Texas and have been friends since 1993. One at a time, they moved to Austin. Hrasky grew up in Rockford, Ill., and moved to Austin in 1999 for school. 

Looking to meet like-minded musicians, he hung up a flyer at a record store seeking to form a “sad, triumphant rock band.” The posting got the attention of the guitar players. The four musicians quickly hit it off and decided to take the name Explosions in the Sky after hearing fireworks on the Fourth of July. 

“From the beginning we liked the idea of (the band) being instrumental,” Hrasky says during a recent telephone conversation. “Michael actually is, in my opinion, a really amazing singer… but we just liked the idea of being a band without a leader — where it is not one person’s vision and three other guys backing him up. It’s a shared vision between the four of us.” 

To this day, all of the decisions the band makes have to be unanimous, including the decision to sign with indie label Temporary Residence Limited. The group’s first album, “How Strange, Innocence,” was released in 2000 and reissued five years later. 

After seeing one of the band’s shows, independent film director Kat Candler asked them to score her film “Cicadas” in 2000. Two years later, Explosions also scored Candler’s film “The Absence of Wings.” 

The band’s music fit naturally on the big screen. Explosions’ songs skip the verse-chorus-verse form and usually take between five and 12 minutes to build up or cascade into silence. 

“We don’t even figure out the tone of a song until it’s done — we go back and say, ‘It has a warm and comforting tone or a terrifying tone,’” Hrasky says. “We generally have the songs before we have the titles.” 

A single track can take months to record, Hrasky says, as the band is “blindly grasping to find the song.” That rhythm was broken for Explosions’ fourth album, “The Rescue,” which was recorded and mixed within a couple of weeks. 

“We would meet up at noon with nothing in mind and lay something down, record it and finish it that day,” Hrasky says. “We met at Mike’s house. One of us would go in there and start playing something for an hour before recording it; and then the next guy would go in and put something on top of it.” 

In eight days, they recorded eight songs, titled, “Day 1,” “Day 2,” etc. 

One of the songs is loosely based on an experience, from their first tour, when their van broke down in Syracuse, New York, and they stayed in a stranger’s attic for eight days while it was being worked on. To pass the time, they made a video and used bits of audio from it for the song. 

“The Rescue” was released in 2005, after the band found success with “Friday Night Lights.” The group’s music is also used on the television show of the same name. The exposure has translated into bigger crowds at the band’s gigs. 

“This is really encouraging and something we are really excited (about) that music is appealing to more than the niche market.” Hrasky says. 

During the time Explosions in the Sky was recording “All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone,” Hrasky and his bandmates felt like they had lost touch with family and friends. 

“The theme (of the album) is a person going about their life and something happening — something that shakes them out of their routine,” Hrasky says. “They suddenly realize they have lost touch with the friends or family or people they are close to. (It’s about) the isolation that they would feel.”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.