Northern Dial Artist Profile

Walk Off the Earth

Burlington, Ontario, Canada

Formed in Burlington, Ontario, Walk Off the Earth spent years developing a highly visual, multi-instrumental approach before a 2012 cover of Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know" transformed the band's reach. The video, built around five musicians playing a single guitar, became a viral phenomenon and demonstrated the group's central idea: arrangements and performance concepts could be as important to online discovery as the song itself. The attention led to a major-label deal and gave the band an international audience without requiring it to abandon the do-it-yourself video culture that created the breakthrough.

Walk Off the Earth converted that attention into an original catalogue. R.E.V.O. included the Canadian hit "Red Hands," while Sing It All Away helped the group win the 2016 JUNO for Group of the Year. The band maintained a heavy international touring schedule and continued treating unconventional instruments, tightly coordinated videos and pop songwriting as parts of the same creative language. After the death of keyboardist and vocalist Mike "Beard Guy" Taylor in 2018, the group honoured him publicly and continued recording and performing.

Later projects broadened the band's audience further, including the children's Romeo Eats series, whose second volume won a JUNO, and the 2023 single "My Stupid Heart." Walk Off the Earth's significance is closely tied to a particular shift in Canadian music culture: they were among the acts that showed how a band could use YouTube-era visual invention to build a global audience, then turn viral attention into a sustained recording and touring career.