Mowgli's

The Mowgli's are a sprawling, sunny alt-rock collective from Calabasas, just outside Los Angeles, where most of them grew up together. The spark came in late 2009, when Michael Vincze met Colin Dieden, freshly arrived from Kansas City, at a party; the two soon stitched their half-finished ideas into one of the band's first songs, "The Great Divide". Josh Hogan, who grew up in Oklahoma City, joined after sitting in on a jam one night.

The name comes from a former member's dog, Mowgli, himself named for the boy in Kipling's The Jungle Book, and the apostrophe is on purpose: the way they saw it, the band belonged to the dog, not the other way around.

Their breakout song has an origin story to match. Vincze and Dieden wrote "San Francisco" in a cheap motel room during a spur-of-the-moment trip to the city, and on the 2012 album Sound the Drum it plays like a love letter shouted by a crowd, stomping and wide open, more campfire than mosh pit. Kids in Love followed in 2015, and "I'm Good" wore its optimism right in the title.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.