Early States formed in November of 2007 by two good friends: singer/guitarist Zack Gray and keyboardist/guitarist Shaun O'Brien. The band began to pick up momentum after taking first place at a battle of the bands competition in San Francisco, California and being invited to play the Maloof Money Cup in Orange County, California, widely known as the biggest skateboard competition ever hosted.

After releasing their debut EP "Powerlines" in Nov '08, the band was quickly named one of the top 21 unsigned bands of 2008 by Purevolume.com. Subsequently, Early States' purevolume profile logged in over 100,000 plays and gained them a whole new audience. In addition, their song "Smoke In My Eyes" was placed in the TNT show "Trust Me" (March 10th '09 episode). Following on that success, Early States submitted their music to MTV and was excited to find that MTV used three different ES songs in the show "True Life: I"m Rehabbing My Injury."

With the attention Smoke In My Eyes received, Early States decided to release the song as a remix. The song was remixed by AMPLIVE, better known for his remixes of Radiohead's In Rainbows, and Tokyo Police Club's Baskervilles, and Linkin Park.

As 2009 unfolded, ES continued getting good news: They were selected as the Finalist in the Rock Category of the John Lennon Songwriting contest, winning over $4,000 in prizes and being selected to play on the Vans Warped Tour summer of 2009. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.