Richy Mitch & the Coal Miners are Seattle’s next breakout band

Richy Mitch & the Coal Miners are still getting acquainted with their adopted home city. It’s been roughly a year and a half since the red-hot folk rockers relocated to Washington from Montana as the band started picking up steam.

When not on tour, the lifelong friends from Colorado head into Seattle from their Eastside abode a couple of nights a week. While in town, they catch bands like Mk.gee and Slow Pulp at Neumos or play low-key solo coffee shop gigs, looking to meet other songwriters and tap in with a local music scene frontman Mitch Cutts describes as “super diverse.”

“Honestly, just to get out and see the city, for me, it’s tourism,” Cutts says. “I love it.”

The new guys in town find themselves in the unique position of ingratiating themselves into the Seattle music community while simultaneously writing their place into its rich lineage as the city’s latest breakout band.

Richy Mitch & the Coal Miners — or RMCM as its acronymically known — had its local coming out party with an impressively rangy afternoon set at 2023’s THING Festival in Port Townsend. A few months later, RMCM’s career skyrocketed when their 7-year-old fragment of a song “Evergreen” caught viral fire on TikTok in early 2024, soundtracking hundreds of thousands of optimistic and outdoorsy videos.

By midsummer, the original acoustic nugget clocking in under a minute and a half had gone platinum and cracked the Billboard Hot 100 chart, as the longtime friends from Colorado Springs played major festival dates and Red Rocks Amphitheatre, opening for Mt. Joy at their fabled home state venue. In August, a fleshed-out version of “Evergreen” rerecorded with Americana heavyweights Caamp gave the tune another boost as RMCM prepped for a sold-out fall club tour, which concludes at Neumos this Saturday and Sunday (Nov. 23-24).

“For me, it’s a song about hiking and just taking a step out and doing something,” says Cutts, an avid hiker, skier and backpacker. “But it has become a cool song where in online communities it will represent positivity or hope or that kind of thing. … To see an actor that I grew up watching [in] movies use it, it’s a bit freaky because it just makes this song this much bigger thing than just a minute 27 seconds of guitar music.”

“I think it clicked for me when we were just getting annihilated on Gmail about management and labels and [expletive],” says drummer Jakob Ervin of the song’s sleeper-hit success. “But it has been cool to see the song take new meaning.”

The twin Neumos shows — and a DJ set after-party on Sunday downstairs in Barboza — will be RMCM’s long-awaited first headline shows in their adopted home city.

The institutional midsized club on Capitol Hill, the city’s preeminent nightlife neighborhood, isn’t typically where Seattle bands make their local headlining debut (let alone play two nights). Calling from a San Diego hotel room, Cutts sounds genuinely a little bummed to be leapfrogging some of the smaller steppingstone clubs in town. First-world buzz band problems.

“I was kind of upset about not playing Barboza or Madame Lou’s, because I kind of want to play all the venues,” he says. “So being able to do that after[party] and give the stupidest, funnest DJ set as kind of a victory lap just finishing tour is going to be amazing.”

Richy Mitch & the Coal Miners began as the high school band of singer-songwriter Cutts, Ervin and guitarist/producer/in-house artist Nic Haughn. They released their debut album, with the opening track “Evergreen,” the day they graduated in 2017 before going off to college in different parts of the country. The band continued during school breaks as a way for the three friends to stay connected, releasing two more albums “Solstice” (2018) and “Subliming” (2019) the following years.

After college, Cutts and Haughn moved to Montana to do the ski-bum thing until RMCM — at that point, a fairly anonymous “total art project,” says Cutts — started garnering industry interest in late 2022. Looking to seize the unplanned opportunity to make music a career, the guys wanted to move to a larger city with more of a music scene, access to gear shops and crucially, as Ervin notes, an international airport.

A group of outdoorsy, indie-rocking folkies arrives in Seattle searching for a musical home base? Natural fit, all right.

“Seattle was a no-brainer just because of the history there,” says Cutts, noting that the Pacific Northwest had been on the friends’ radars even before the band took off. “We all take a lot of influence from bands that have come from that area in the greater Northwest. And also, it’s great for writing. I love what the nature brings. It’s always been a focal point of our music.”

It also didn’t hurt that RMCM’s bassist Dylan Schneider hails from Lake Stevens.

The band’s Northwest influences are felt acutely as ever on their latest song, “October Moon,” which doubles as the name of their fall tour. It’s an autumnal Fleet Foxes-indebted tune that comes into full bloom with an electric guitar outro, which Cutts says was directly inspired by other Seattle indie rock royalty, Band of Horses.

Elsewhere in their catalog, it’s easy to hear a little The Head and the Heart on tracks like “Lake Missoula” — RMCM’s second biggest song, which also dates back to their high school debut. (Rootsy alt-rockers Mt. Joy joined RMCM last year for an updated version that sounds as warm as a Saturday night inside Conor Byrne.)

To think, Cutts’ and Haughn’s musical careers almost ended before a teenage Cutts fell in love with folk music in the mid-2010s via “stomp and holler”-era bands like The Lumineers and The Head and the Heart. Prior to RMCM, the two friends were in another short-lived high school band that proved far less promising.

“It was a metal band called Beethoven’s Hot Sister. It was terrible,” Cutts says. “We made, like, one song. We were like, ‘This music thing isn’t for us.’”

Fortunately, they didn’t hang it up entirely and by his junior or senior year Cutts, who plays piano and guitar, started writing folk songs inspired by learning chord progressions from some of those aforementioned indie-folk stars.

Although their old-timey-sounding band name conjures banjo-wielding images of Mumford & Sons disciples, RMCM started stretching out their sound on 2018’s “Solstice,” incorporating more progressive alternative rock influences like Vampire Weekend and Rainbow Kitten Surprise. Some of those jammier, more intricate and psychedelic guitar parts stood out during last year’s THING performance.

The band and its name were initially conceived as a companion piece to a high school film they made (entirely in German) about a coal-mining wizard. They submitted their “magnum opus as filmmakers” for a number of school projects and the name stuck, somewhat reluctantly.

“Have we tried to change our band name several times? Yes,” Cutts, 26, admits. “But it’s nice now to be able to say it a bit more with our chest now that we’ve been able to turn it into a relatively sustainable project.”

“I think what we’ve done is legitimize the name a little bit more,” adds Ervin, 25. “But I definitely used to be … real shy about it.”

Indeed, the former childhood “fart-joke friends” turned “fiercely independent” 20-somethings have much to be proud of just two years since their high school art project became a promising music career. Since putting out their last album “Subliming” in 2019, RMCM has released a steady trickle of impressive singles over the last two years, including 2023’s “Signal Sender,” with its spacey, My Morning Jacket-y guitar work. The group plans to self-release their next album, which Cutts describes as “pretty heady and very artsy,” in early 2025.

It’s a “deeply personal” record largely about the core trio growing up together, heavily steeped in their Colorado roots. Here’s hoping the post-album push accommodates a more conspicuous presence in their current home, where RMCM gets an overdue welcoming with this weekend’s Neumos blowout.

“It’s one of those things where it’s like calling it home,” Cutts says. “You start to call a place home, more and more it starts to feel more like home. … Two Neumos shows within a year and a half of touring, that’s really not a lot of facetime in Seattle. But the goal is really to just find musicians and bands and go to their shows and keep spreading the word. Over time, more and more people are starting to recognize we’re here (and) reach out about fun local stuff.”

Keep those local invites coming.