Popular American folk-rock band The Lumineers is back in India for the second time and lead vocalist Wesley Schultz hopes that their performance leads to many more such trips to the country.
The Grammy-nominated group, known for hits such as "Ho Hey", "Cleopatra", "Stubborn Love" and "Ophelia", will perform at Huda Ground in Delhi-NCR on February 1, 2026.
"What I really want to do is eat a lot more food when I'm there and meet more people and see some of the sights," Schultz told PTI in an interview about his wishlist of things he wants to do during his visit.
Schultz and his bandmate Jeremiah Fraites first came to India for a show in Pune in November 2022 when they headlined the Bacardi NH7 Weekender festival but this marks their first stand-alone performance in the country as part of their 'The Automatic World Tour'.
"It was like a whirlwind...We were in the midst of a long tour... The things I do remember are the drives... Everyone seemed not to be fazed at all by how close the cars were getting, and it was kind of amazing to me. And the crowd itself felt way more passionate than I maybe would have expected. So I'm super excited to be going back... I'm glad for the excuse to go through touring, but I think we're all just really excited to get to go back again. And we hope this is the first or the second of many trips to India," he added.
Asked about the secret of staying strong for over two decades, Schultz said the best part of making music with Fraites is that there is no one to tell them what they should or should not do.
"(There's) no one in the room, except me and Jeremiah, typically just writing. So I think that's the engine behind why we were passionate about it because no one gets to tell us what to do. Everywhere else in our life, someone has to say, but here we get to make all the decisions and explore things," he said.
Schultz is not familiar with the artists in India or anywhere around the world, but is excited to "dive into other styles of music" during his trip.
"I listened mostly to artists from like the 70s. So I feel like an old man. I'm excited to sort of dive into some of that because not only for the musicians themselves, but the style of music, some of the scales that are used...And the time signatures are often very different from Western music. So I am excited to hear that," he said.
'Automatic' is their fifth album after self-titled debut album in 2012, 'Cleopatra' (2016), 'III' (2019) and 'Brightside' (2022), and it was made in the "most innocent way", Schultz said.
"It marked 20 years of me and Jeremiah making music together, which is a big deal for us... We did it very quickly and we didn't do many takes of any songs, so it felt like we were just innocent kids making music. We didn't really know what we were doing because we were recording so quickly. It's our fifth album, but it feels a lot more like our first album because it's really raw." Released in February 2025, 'Automatic' comprises 11 songs with tracks such as "Strings", "Plasticine" and "Same Old Song", among others.
The singer-guitarist believes The Lumineers is "slowly evolving" with each album. "If you were to listen to our fifth album and then go right back, back to the first, you're going to hear a lot of differences. But if you listen to them in sequence, it's a slow evolution," he said.
Schultz said the band is proud that people are coming for their show.
"We're so excited. We're also just really proud to be able to like, say, we can play a show here and there's people coming," he said.
The India concert of The Lumineers is produced and promoted by BookMyShow Live.
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