Two Guys, One Upright Bass, Twelve Tracks: Drawknife's "Off the Cuff" Lands
Some bands form in a garage. Drawknife formed the way a lot of the best Athens things do — two people crossing paths at Ohio University and deciding the world needed a little more banjo in it. That was 2011. Fifteen years later, Kyle Lyons and George Van Fossen are dropping a 12-track LP called "Off the Cuff," and if you've spent any time in the good rooms of this town, you've almost certainly already heard them warming one up.
For the uninitiated: Drawknife is an Athens "eclectic folk Americana" duo, which is a lot of hyphens doing a lot of honest work. Lyons handles banjo, guitar, and vocals; Van Fossen anchors it all on upright bass. That's the whole rig — no drummer to hide behind, no synth pad to fill the silence. It's the kind of stripped-down setup that either exposes you completely or lets you fly, and Drawknife has spent a decade-plus proving they can fly. They're regulars at Donkey Coffee, the fair-trade listening room at 17½ W. Washington St. where the crowd actually shuts up and listens, and at The Union, where the crowd emphatically does not — a range that tells you these two can read a room.
"Off the Cuff" is a full-length, and for a duo that's no small statement. Twelve tracks is a lot of ground to cover with two players and a couple of stringed instruments; it's a bet that the songs can carry the weight without the studio doing the heavy lifting. The record follows their 2024 EP "Long Way Home," so this is a band on a genuine roll rather than one dusting off after a long hiatus. It was tracked at Peachfork Studios down in Pomeroy — properly Southeast Ohio, hills and river country, exactly the geography this music seems to grow out of — with producer Bernie Nau at the boards.
Why does a two-man folk record matter in a town obsessed with its punk basements and its brewery stages? Because Athens music has always been wider than its loudest corner. For every sweaty metal bill at The Union there's a Tuesday-night songwriter at Donkey Coffee holding forty people in total silence, and that quieter tradition is every bit as much the local sound as anything with a distortion pedal. Drawknife lives in that tradition and takes it seriously — the "eclectic" in "eclectic folk Americana" is a promise that they're not just recycling three chords and a train metaphor.
There's also something fitting about the timing. Dropping a record in the dead of the Athens summer, when the student crowd is scattered to the four winds, is a move made for the people who are actually here — the year-rounders who'll have "Off the Cuff" memorized by the time the freshmen arrive and "discover" Drawknife at some fall show, convinced they're in on a secret. They're not. This town has been in on it since 2011.
Exact release date is the one thing still shaking loose as of this writing — — but "summer 2026" is the word, and summer's burning down fast. Keep an eye on the Donkey and The Union calendars, because a record like this doesn't stay on a hard drive. It gets played, live, in a room, the way these two have always done it. Bring your ears. Maybe leave the talking to the metal shows.
Sources: Drawknife feature, The Post; Athens Summer Music Roundup 2026