OK Go, known as the ‘treadmill guys,’ can also bring it live

That band with the treadmills.

Damian Kulash, lead singer of OK Go, is aware a lot of people know the group only by that vague moniker, courtesy of a mesmerizing 2006 video for “Here It Goes Again” using eight treadmills and an intricate choreographed dance done in a single take.

That video went viral in the early days of YouTube, cementing the band’s reputation as quirky multimedia auteurs. OK Go’s philosophy: Come for the video, stay for the music, a blend of indie power pop, rock, dance and punk.

Among the features in the dozens of crazy one-take videos they’ve done over the years are a Rube Goldberg-style machine (“This Too Shall Pass”), dog tricks (“White Knuckles”) and zero gravity (“Upside Down & Inside Out”). Their video for “Love,” off their new album, “And the Adjacent Possible,” features 29 robotic arms and 60 mirrors.

“I get to play with robots and mirrors and optical illusions and great filmmakers,” Kulash said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to promote OK Go’s new album and tour, which includes a stop at the Eastern on Sunday. “It only dawned on us later in our career why we wound up here in the first place. I think the kind of connection you get from our videos ― a moment of joy or wonder or spectacle ― is a closer feeling to a live show than a video of someone, say, just playing an acoustic guitar.”

The treadmill video came about in part because visually, the band, despite its punk and indie roots in Chicago, was less about “cigarettes and shuffling your feet and more about fist pumping and people having fun in the audience,” Kulash said.

In 2003, OK Go learned boy band choreography as a way to end each show to “make fun of ourselves,” he said. “A practice tape of that dance got online before YouTube. It went proto-viral, seen 400,000 times. We were on a major label and that’s how much we had sold up to that point.”

“So we figured if we can make a video by accident,” he added, “we can do one on purpose.”

The band decided to create a dance nobody had seen before using eight treadmills rented from a gym equipment salesman, and spent 10 days conjuring up a one-take video with help from Kulash’s sister Trish Sie, a professional ballroom dancer. The budget: a mere $4,000.

“The way you discover yourself creatively is to hurl yourself into it,” Kulash said. “We literally did that. Ninety percent of it was failure, but 10% of the time it was amazing. We ended up with a lot of bruises.”

OK Go are not just one-trick video ponies. They are also known for rambunctious, interactive live shows.

“We do a lot of Q and A with the audience,” Kulash said. “And there’s a lot of confetti. We aren’t doing Rube Goldberg machines on stage, but if you think about it, when a band is firing on all cylinders, they are a Rube Goldberg machine in the way it all connects. It can be magic.”

OK Go has made tour stops in Atlanta at least 10 times, but the band’s last visit was more than a decade ago, at the Buckhead Theatre. At the time, Kulash and guitarist Andy Ross decided to take a break from aggressive touring, focusing instead on raising kids and other creative pursuits.

Kulash, for instance, spent six months in late 2022 and early 2023 in metro Atlanta directing the Apple TV+ movie “The Beanie Bubble,” starring Zach Galifianakis, Elizabeth Banks and Sarah Snook, about the Beanie Baby craze in the 1990s.

“It was a really fun move to make,” Kulash said. “It was an amazing time. I kind of stupidly thought I would have time to produce, write and record music while doing it. Directing a movie has a more aggressive schedule than that.”

But he did fall in love with the city, living by Piedmont Park. “I got to walk with my kids and see a real slice of different communities,” he said. “It didn’t feel cloistered.”

This year, OK Go released its first studio album since 2014, called "And the Adjacent Possible," and is coming to the Eastern on Sunday. (Courtesy of Piper Ferguson)

Hitting the road again, though, has been invigorating, Kulash said.

“Our last tour (in 2017) was a live video tour where we live-scored our videos,” he said. “It was a more theatrical sit-down experience. It’s nice to just get back to basic rock ‘n’ roll, to sweat and dance.”

The time off to grow individually helped the band create better music together, Kulash said, citing OK Go’s 2025 release as the band’s best to date: “It captures the organic live energy of our first two records, the psychedelic sonic textures of our third and the dancey synth flavors of our fourth.”

Ultimately, he added, “it’s the most uniquely our own voice. We’re more comfortable in our own skin than we ever were before.”

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