The Wall Street Journal‘s music writer Jim Fusilli, who calls Who’s Feeling Young Now? “terrific,” sat down with Punch Brothers’ Chris Thile and Noam Pikelny to discuss their new album, their innovative and ever-evolving music, and its relationship to the legacy of Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs. Watch the piece below.

The New York Daily News has included the band and their new album on the Top 10 Things in Music for the past two weeks. American Songwriter magazine gives Who’s Feeling Young Now? four stars. What Punch Brothers ” established on 2010’s Antifogmatic the band takes even further on Who’s Feeling Young Now?,” says American Songwriter‘s Nick Zaino. “The musical leaps Punch Brothers takes are invigorating, sometimes breathtaking.” Read the four-star review at americansongwriter.com.

The band heads next to Tel Aviv, Israel, for two days of performances at Hangar 11 as part of the White City Music Festival. The Jerusalem Post, in a preview of the shows, calls them “one of the most acclaimed and upcoming young American bands.” Their “eclecticism, encompassing strains of everything from alt-pop and classical to discordant electronica and classic rock—and let’s not forget, bluegrass—has been the lifeblood of the Punch Brothers” since the start, says the Post‘s David Brinn. Read more and see what Noam Pikelny has to say at jpost.com.

Watch Chris Thile and Noam Pikelny’s interview with the Wall Street Journal here:

“It has always been hard to pigeonhole Punch Brothers. They are an all-star bluegrass band, five virtuosos led by Chris Thile, the mercurial mandolin player, but their songs smash the three-chord harmonies and blazing march rhythm of bluegrass,” writes McKinley. “They write dramatic, labyrinthine pieces that straddle genres. Sometimes they sound like a progressive art rock group going acoustic, sometimes like an avant-garde jazz combo with an Earl Scruggs-style banjo mixed in and sometimes like down-home pickers at a county fair. Above the music floats Mr. Thile’s clear tenor, singing deeply personal lyrics, usually about love’s collateral damage. It is restless music, by musicians so preternaturally talented they get bored easily with fiddle tunes.”

Read more from McKinley and see what Thile and Pikelny have to say at nytimes.com.

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Punch Brothers are also the subject of a feature article in the New York Daily News by the paper’s music critic, Jim Farber, who also notes the Scruggs connection.

“They use all the classic components of bluegrass—sawing fiddles, jittery banjos, flinty guitars, and flickering mandolins,” writes Farber. “But no hearing person would mistake the way the Punch Brothers play those instruments for the Appalachian pickings of Earl Scruggs or Ricky Skaggs.”

Farber continues: “Instead, the structure and feel of their songs draws on elements as broad as modern jazz, avant-garde classical music and prog-rock. In the process, The Punch Brothers … have not only turned a rural sound urban, they’ve achieved that most rare of musical feats—to create something genuinely new.”

Read the complete article at nydailynews.com.

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Tonight’s concert is today’s Gig Alert from New York NPR member station WNYC. Punch Brothers were guests on yesterday’s episode of WNYC’s Soundcheck. The special edition of Soundcheck was held before a sold-out audience in the Greene Space in downtown Manhattan and broadcast live on WNYC. The band spoke with host John Schaefer and performed songs from Who’s Feeling Young Now? —”Movement and Location,” “Who’s Feeling Young Now?,” “Patchwork Girlfriend,” and “Flippen.” You can listen to the episode, featuring what the show calls the band’s “rollicking string-band rock,” here:

“By now, the virtuosity and stylistic cunning of Punch Brothers have so radically redefined the possibilities of conventional string instrumentation that one almost forgets that bluegrass roots still sits at the heart of every sound the ensemble makes,” says Lexington Herald Leader contributing music writer Walter Tunis in his review of last night’s show, which “was easily the most exciting and inventive of its many Lexington area performances.” In addition to some key cover tunes that have become an integral part of the band’s repertoire—including Radiohead’s “Kid A,” which they perform on Who’s Feeling Young Now? and The Cars’ “Just What I Needed,” which you can watch them take on here—they explored “original material that soared through all manner of progressive references, from rockish percussive riffs to fanciful swing-on-string runs that could best be described as psychedelic acoustic vaudeville.”

The set closed with another much-loved cover: The Band’s “Ophelia.” Punch Brothers dedicated the tune to The Band’s Levon Helm, who, his family has reported, is in “the final stages” of cancer.

Read Tunis’s complete review of the concert in his blog The Musical Box. Read Tunis’s article on the band in the Herald Leader, featuring an interview with Punch Brothers guitarist Chris Eldridge, at kentucky.com.

Punch Brothers’ upcoming performances include stops in Knoxville, Nashville, Atlanta, Chattanooga, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, DC, before a set at MerleFest in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. The tour also makes a stop in Austin, where the band will tape an episode of Austin City Limits at Moody Theater on May 1 for future broadcast on PBS—raffle for free tickets will be announced on ACL‘s site shortly—and play a sold-out show at Antone’s on May 2. The tour wraps up with a sold out LA Bluegrass Situation show at Largo in Los Angeles on May 4. Several summer festival dates follow. For details and ticket links, visit the tour page.

In addition to our show at Scala in London on May 7th, we’ll be heading back across the Atlantic this July. We’re playing Latitude Festival and Larmer Tree Festival in the UK and a headline date at Whelan’s in Dublin on July 17th. Tickets for Dublin are on-sale now and we’ll have more European dates to announce in the coming weeks! Keep an eye on the tour page for details.