The Cloak Ox is made of four staunch music-making Midwestern men. They are Andrew Broder, Jeremy Ylvisaker, Mark Erickson and Martin Dosh and their names may be familiar. Of course, they may not be. They hail from Minneapolis, MN, and have been friends for many years, playing a lot—a lot—of music together and apart. They have started bands, quit bands, restarted bands, played in others' bands, inspired other people's bands that became very successful, and even sometimes joined those bands after the fact. Suffice it to say, they have played damn near every kind of music there is to play. 

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But with the Cloak Ox, these four return to rock and roll, and they play it very, very well. Sometimes it's loud and sometimes it's quiet. Sometimes it's funky and sometimes it's gentle. Sometimes they spazz the fuck out and sometimes they boogie. Andrew's words can be sad or funny, surreal or mundane, tender or venomous. And it's the combination of all of those things that makes the band's debut EP, Prisen, something to marvel at—a modern testament to human ingenuity and American workmanship proudly no more nor less than sum of its finely tuned parts. In their past lives, combos and collaborations, the members of the Cloak Ox have been lauded and dismissed. They have succeeded and failed. They have been respected and completely forgotten. Their story is a lot like your story, and you are the best rock and roll band in the world.