In early summer, if you followed both Grateful Dead Land and the psych-rock underground,  you may have noticed Los Angeles’ Grateful Shred in your feeds—gigging with Howlin Rain, playing Terrapin Crossroads and Brooklyn Bowl. They seemed to live at the narrow intersection of hip and Dead. Then, the Grateful Dead endorsed their video jams.

Grateful Shred was born in 2016 when singer and guitar picker Austin McCutchen—who was short a band during one night of a residency—brought in his four housemates to play a Dead set. The gig offers snowballed from there. There’s a freshness and a hunger to Grateful Shred’s sound—this is a young band of players in their prime. Bassist Dan Horne plays with Cass McCombs, is a member of Circles Around the Sun and gigs with Jonathan Wilson. Singers/guitarists Sam Blasucci and Clay Finch perform as the psych- country duo Mapache.

They’re not veterans of Dead tours; they’re rooted in California country rock and jazz. It isn’t a tribute, Horne insists. They’re not playing characters. They study a particular version of a song, or several, and from there, he says, they try to sound like themselves while keeping an ear to signature Grateful Dead musical tricks.

“There’s a musical vocabulary,” Horne says, “as far as rhythms and soloing style and harmony, that we do try to stick to. The drum beats and the bassline grooves… It’s kind of like it comes from our background of growing up in California, playing country rock and folk music, and learning how to sing harmony and all that stuff. That is the same type of thing [the Grateful Dead] did.”

Live, “St. Stephen” may sound like ‘68 Dead, “Eyes of the World” like ‘73 and “The Music Never Stopped” like Blues for Allah. They’ve got three guitarists and only one drummer. Whoever has the voice for a song sings it. They’ve got great harmonies. They may be from LA, but they end up capturing some of the feel of a young, live Grateful Dead.

This article originally appears in the October/November 2018 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.