About

Don Caballero started in Pittsburgh in 1991, with Mike Banfield on guitar, Damon Che on drums, and Patrick Morris on bass. They released two singles on small labels the following year, and then made a noticeable leap forward with their 1993 album For Respect, for which Ian Williams joined on guitar and with which the band jumped to Touch and Go Records, home to the likes of The Jesus Lizard and Slint. 

The band progressed dimensionally with 1995’s double LP Don Caballero II, which amped up both the inherent wit of the band and its rhythmic and its compositional and instrumental complexity. The band went on hiatus afterward—but the quartet lineup reconvened to make another leap forward with 1998’s What Burns Never Returns, which layered on even more compositional complexity, and brought to the forefront the band’s sure hand with more delicate structures and dynamics. 

After that album, the band shrunk to a trio. Eric Emm took over on bass, and, after some touring and woodshedding on new material, they recorded the landmark American Don with Steve Albini and released it in 2000. This album, which leaned heavily on Williams’s guitar loops and Emm’s bass loops, proved arguably the band’s most realized and influential work. Unfortunately, internal tensions—often visible even to casual fans—were long an issue within the band, and they extracted their toll. After a lengthy stint touring before and after American Don’s release—a stint that ended with a severe van crash on November 21, 2000, while en route to the tour’s final show in Detroit—this lineup split up, this time for good. 

Che reformed the band with another lineup for two more albums, 2005’s World Class Listening Problem and 2008’s Punkgasm, and later went on to the duo Yesness. Williams went on to lead the experimental rock group Battles and Emm formed the synth-pop-driven Tanlines.

But in the ensuing years, Don Caballero’s stature and rep has only grown. The band was a linchpin for Nick Gomez 2024 book Math Rock. A Don Caballero documentary is nearing completion; a book about them is also in the works.