OneRepublic

OneRepublic traces back to a friendship between Ryan Tedder and Zach Filkins, who met as students at Colorado Springs Christian High School and first tried forming a band together as teenagers under the name This Beautiful Mess^[6]. The two went their separate ways for college, then reunited in Los Angeles in 2002 to try again, this time recruiting drummer Eddie Fisher, bassist and cellist Brent Kutzle, and guitarist Drew Brown to round out the lineup. The group initially called itself Republic, before a label's concerns over potential naming conflicts pushed them to become OneRepublic^[6].

An early deal with Columbia Records fell apart after the band was dropped from the label's roster following a Coachella performance. Rather than disbanding, OneRepublic turned to Myspace, where they built such a large grassroots following that they became the platform's top unsigned act, a visibility that eventually caught the attention of producer Timbaland's Mosley Music Group^[6].

That connection led to the band's debut album, Dreaming Out Loud, released November 20, 2007. Its lead single, "Apologize," remixed by Timbaland, became a global breakthrough, reaching number one in sixteen countries and earning the band a Grammy nomination^[6]. Subsequent albums built steadily on that foundation: Waking Up in 2009 sold more than a million copies worldwide, Native in 2013 became their first top-ten album in the US, and Oh My My in 2016 gave them their highest chart debut yet at number three^[6].

Success came with real strain. Tedder has said that the grinding promotional cycle around Oh My My left him close to walking away from the band entirely, a period he has openly described as burnout^[5]. What kept him committed, by his own account, was the way songwriting and production work for other artists, including Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Adele, and later BTS and Tate McRae, replenished his creative energy; he has also pointed to his early breakthrough writing Leona Lewis's "Bleeding Love" as the project that first proved his instincts as a songwriter^[5]. He now describes the years since as a deliberate second chapter for the band, one he has committed to sustaining toward a twenty-year career arc^[5]. The band's fifth album, Human, arrived in 2021 after repeated pandemic-related delays that Tedder has called the most difficult production of his career, with some songs going through dozens of revisions before release^[5].

OneRepublic's sixth album, Artificial Paradise, arrived in July 2024 as the final record under their long-running deal with Interscope^[4]. In 2025, after eighteen years with that label relationship, the band signed with BMG, a change Tedder has compared to leaving a long marriage for a new partnership and one he has credited with reinvigorating his songwriting^[6][2]. Their first release under that new chapter, "Need Your Love," arrived April 3, 2026, as the initial single from an upcoming seventh studio album^[1].