Pioneers of New York’s underground country music scene, the Flanks formed in 2002, arriving in the city from Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Hampshire, California, and exit 9 of the New Jersey Turnpike. Embracing a rugged country-folk style described by one listener as “all spit and no polish,” and by others as “garage country,” the Flanks write and perform songs unlike anything the city’s heard-it-all music lovers are likely to experience during a night out: a sound deliberately gritty and rough around the edges, drawing on influences as earthy as eighty-year-old jug band music and as unapologetic as ’70s outlaw country.

The Flanks have performed live in-studio on New York Public Radio's Soundcheck and for an audience of thousands at a NASCAR Nextel Cup race in New Hampshire. Music by the Flanks can be heard on the Onion News Network and in the award-winning independent film Hell’s Gate. The band appears in a nationally televised commercial for Sylvania light bulbs and in Get a Rope, a forthcoming documentary on roots music in New York City. Tracks from their album, You and Me and the People Who Can’t Go Home, have received airplay on many area radio stations, and their song “Briefcase Full of Nobody’s Business” provides the theme music for The Arnie Arnesen Show, a political talk program heard all over New England. The Flanks are veterans of residencies at several New York venues, including Galapagos Arts Space. 

They say it isn’t easy being the hardest working band in show business. That’s why the Flanks don't even try. But an easygoing ethos hasn’t stopped the band from winning over audiences wherever they play. With songs both comic and calamitous, the band sings of shady characters, questionable goings-on, regrettable sets of personal circumstances, petty thievery, chemical impairments, and the loss of their hearts to attractive divorcées. One day the Flanks hope to be as eloquent as John Prine and as sweaty as Muddy Waters.