Ra Ra Riot, courtesy.

This story originally appeared in the Oakland Tribune.

New England indie-pop band Ra Ra Riot was in the midst of a breakout year in 2007, riding the “next it-band” wave, when tragedy struck.

The sextet from Syracuse University had traded house parties for festival stages and had performed June 2 in Providence, R.I. A few hours later, drummer John Pike disappeared. He was found dead the following day – an apparent drowning victim.

“It’s impossible to know how to react to that,” Ra Ra Riot vocalist Wes Miles said. The band, which decided to press on, performs a sold-out show Friday at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.

“As we all started talking about what we were going to do, we all thought the best thing would be to play the music we made with him,” Miles said. “That would be a way to remember and have each other to heal.”

The chamber pop band, which also includes bassist Mathieu Santos, guitarist Milo Bonacci, cellist Alexandra Lawn, violinist Rebecca Zeller and drummer Kenny Bernard – whose first show with the band will be in San Francisco – came together in 2006. Miles, the lead singer, was the last addition.

“Milo was the guy who knew everybody,” Miles said. “I was trying to start another band at the time and he just absorbed what I was trying to do. I knew John since my freshman year; we played music together a lot. But it was my first time meeting Mathieu, Rebecca and Allie.”

For the musicians, the band was a way to pass their last semester in college. Zeller and Lawn were music majors. Santos, a painter, was studying art. Pike was studying television, radio and film. Miles was training to become a physicist.

After its members graduated, Ra Ra Riot toured and played a festival in the fall of 2006.

“People in the music industry started taking an interest; it was like, ‘If these people think that it’s worth a try, why not?’ ” Miles said.

Then, Pike was killed. The drummer had cowritten several of the band’s songs and was loved by the others.

“It’s never something we are going to leave behind,” Miles said. “It’s not about moving on.”

The band members took time to regroup, using a couple of new drummers. In 2008, the band released its debut album, “The Rhumb Line.”

The album garnered praise from writers that often zeroed in on the contributions of Lawn and Zeller. Their violin and cello melodies set the tone in many songs. But Miles said it was never Ra Ra Riot’s intention to be different from a traditional four-piece rock band.

“The thing that makes it most exciting is that most of the times in music, the string players are performers; they read music that is written for them,” he said. “Rebecca and Allie write everything that they do.”

Zeller and Lawn use their instruments as more than background texture, he said. The band’s intricately layered pop arrangements are often led by violin and cello, with the guitar taking a back seat or jumping in as needed.

For their second album, “The Orchard,” released in August, Ra Ra Riot decamped to a peach orchard in upstate New York.

The album, which had some production help from Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla and Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij, was so named because the band attempted to encapsulate the open space of their environment into the arrangements of its songs.

The sense of the open is apparent in the breezy melodies in songs such as “Boy” and “Too Dramatic.”

“The music is a product of where we were at,” Miles said.

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.