Three years ago, the world’s most exciting modern string band faced an existential crisis: Where were Punch Brothers supposed to go from here? For fifteen years, they had been a consistent quintet of magnificent explorers, their records increasingly testing new ideas of what it took to make acoustic music in this digital century feel not only relevant but revelatory. But in 2023, fiddler Gabe Witcher decided to take his leave, to immerse himself fully in the sessions and scores that had become part of his career. As the remaining Punch Brothers stood at that crossroads, Chris Thile offered bassist Paul Kowert, guitarist Chris Eldridge, and banjo player Noam Pikelny an ambition that doubled as an epiphany: Though he was proud of the work Punch Brothers had already done, he didn’t think they had fully answered one of the central questions of his career and life—that is, what else can a modern string band do? This was the vehicle for that answer. The only way to do that, they all knew, was forward, onward with this adventure together.

The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers is not only the most electrifying and riveting album this reborn quintet, now with the addition of brilliant fiddle player Brittany Haas, has ever made; it is also, as one might surmise from the pun at the start of its title, their first entirely instrumental album. Across The Unsung Adventures’ forty-five seamless minutes, where three reinvented traditionals from around the world are tucked like bright leaves between a half-dozen daring originals, the group stretches its nonpareil technical aplomb with extended techniques and dizzying compositional passages. The result is muscular in multiple senses of the word—brawny but balletic, formidable but fetching.

Additionally, Haas, whose upbringing in fiddle camps and with American, Celtic, and Scandinavian traditions adds an invigorating dynamic, is introduced for the first time on a Punch Brothers album. She gave the band the opportunity to reconsider how fiddle fit into Punch Brothers and what, exactly, this quintet is and can be. From an ending, this is a second beginning. “They’re at the forefront of pushing these boundaries, which is really exciting in this string-band world. It’s kind of what we all want to do,” says Haas, a member of Crooked Still who is also in Hawktail alongside Kowert. “I knew instinctively that joining was going to be a big kick in the butt, because the band is driven by these intense personalities. They are relentless in the desire to make great music.”

In the earliest days, being a Punch Brother was a little bit of a lifestyle. The band consisted of five rather young acoustic musicians, all already with astounding résumés, living in New York. They had a residency there, a place and time into which they could funnel their seemingly limitless energies, enthusiasms, and ideas. That sensibility animated Punch Brothers for more than a decade. But many of the band members have families and other gigs now, and they’re split across state lines rather than city blocks. They were looking for novel ways to reengage that core, to again immerse themselves fully in Punch Brothers universe and see how doing so may reshape their sound.

“There was almost a glorification of the early days: ‘Oh, do you remember when we could all work on one tune for three weeks and scrap it if we needed to?’” explains Pikelny. “And then Energy Curfew provided this structure for us all to be in New York again. It became this laboratory incubation for this new band with Britt.”

Pikelny is referring to The Energy Curfew Music Hour, a variety show presented by Audible and anchored by Punch Brothers. The successor to Thile’s popular Live from Here radio program, Energy Curfew has included guests like James Taylor, Billy Strings, and Kacey Musgraves across just two seasons so far. What’s more, it offered a sort of creative gauntlet for PunchBrothers, prompting them to compose an original piece loosely keyed to each episode’s theme and to reimagine a familiar number in a segment called “Breaking Trad.” They would bend a familiar tune that loosely fit said theme to their string-band will, moving through past and present at once.

As Punch Brothers approached Season Two of Energy Curfew, they began to realize how much momentum the show seemed to gain when the tunes were instrumental, when they could all lock in as players fully integrated into the piece. What if they took this new beginning with Haas and the creative indulgence the show allowed and finally built a truly instrumental record? “My joke is that it’s the Punch Brothers record people always wanted, because we’ve spent more time playing our instruments than singing,” says Chris Eldridge, laughing. “But there’s just something pure about instrumental music. It was feeling very fresh, very unique.”

The band rented a string of houses in upstate New York for writing retreats, throwing out and drilling down on all the ideas they could summon. As Punch Brothers worked with this instrumental paradigm in mind, they found frontiers of integration and exploration. Without Thile writing lyrics that he would sing, it was incumbent on every member to be fully involved, with no instrument simply comping beneath his voice. And the album’s title emerged very early, serving as a reminder to push as hard into the unknown as possible. Indeed, The Unsung Adventures starts with “New Bike,” Haas’ fiddle glinting through the twists and turns like the bright stainless steel of wheel spokes. It ends with “New Book,” where each member makes multiple subtly daring instrumental runs, their imaginations ever seeking another horizon.

“As soon as we put a name on the record, we felt a responsibility to make sure we were being as curious as we were able to, as adventurous as we were able to,” says Thile. “And with the names of the tracks, we were trying to show people the spirit in which these things were written. That’s the spirit of the artist—playing and inventing, because the world compels us to.”

By the time the quintet reached Guilford Sound, tucked into a wooded 400-acre expanse of Vermont, in late 2025, they were an efficient and energized new machine. They planned to finish the record with a second session in a New York studio, but, again, they found that being isolated with the work made them better, that walking through the autumn leaves along mossy trails en route to the studio each morning focused them. They were alone with each other, able to drill down and try forty takes of some incredibly complicated passage, if that’s what it took. They canceled that New York booking and returned to Guilford in December, trudging through the snow on those same trails to go to work. The better part of a decade had passed since their last original album, and they’d spent two years perfecting their musical chemistry with Haas. Why rush this next adventure or go anywhere else?

Not having vocals helped in their pursuit, Kowert reckons. “If it’s a song and there’s words, everything serves that. Take that away, and there’s one less instrument vying for space,” the bassist says. “And not doing vocal takes was freeing because it gave us time back. From an orchestration standpoint, there was more space and time in the studio.”

The Unsung Adventures radiates intention and determination. Take “Sølve-Knut,” the Norwegian tune they tackle [as “Solve Knut (untied)”]. It is dramatic and swooping, Pikelny’s banjo and Eldridge’s guitar twisting beneath Haas’ eruptive fiddle like creeping vines. When Haas sent it to a Norwegian fiddle friend, they informed her the band hadn’t done it entirely right. That, Thile insisted, was the point: to recast it in their own image. “‘Exactly right,’ depends on one’s artistic objectives. Our intention for the traditional material on this record was to use it as a compositional springboard. A way to get to sounds and feelings that we wouldn’t necessarily be able to access otherwise.”

This derring-do sparkles during “Descend, O Diamondback!” Named for Thile’s childhood bike, a Diamondback Topanga, which fueled his imagination as he used it to explore, the tune squeezes the zigs and zags of a prog opus into less than six minutes. Still, it has the easy and free spirit of a jazz band in a communal blowing session, musicians simply enjoying the way this music feels in their bodies and brains. And Punch Brothers have never sounded more simultaneously visceral and curious than on “Saturn: Pogo Ball of the Gods,” where Kowert’s plunging bassline and Thile’s muted strings indeed suggest a game grand enough to have cosmic consequences. The Unsung Adventures feels like the score of an action film that would struggle to keep up with the activity and elan of the very music it inspired.

There is so much more to say about The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers, from the way Pikelny prepared his banjo with rubber bands and paper towels to be a foil to Haas’ fiddle on their “June Apple” rendition or how Eldridge played the acoustic guitar of everyone’s dreams (the first Martin D-28 made in 1937) or how Kowert’s bass was stuck overseas the day the session started to the way Thile sings while he writes even if he doesn’t sing on these finished songs. But the most important thing to say about The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers is how it absolutely feels like an enormous step in that pursuit of possibilities. Punch Brothers have started a new book of their own and, in doing so, opened another chapter for the work of American string bands at large.