Courtesy photo

Punch Brothers is made up of, from left, Gabe Witcher, Noam Pikelny, Chris Thile, Chris Eldridge and Greg Garrison.

Punch Brothers

• Where: Kirk Avenue Music, 22 Kirk Ave. SW, Roanoke
• When: 7:30 p.m. Sunday — SOLD OUT.

Mandolin hotshot Chris Thile is the marquee name in Punch Brothers. But this band — which plays Kirk Avenue Music on Sunday night — is full of hotshots.

Chris “Critter” Eldridge, an original member of the Infamous Stringdusters, plays guitar. Bassist Greg Garrison (Miles Davis) and banjo player Noam Pikelny (John Cowan), are former members of ‘jamgrass’ band Leftover Salmon. Fiddle player Gabe Witcher, a longtime friend of Thile, has played with Beck and was for six years a member of dobro genius Jerry Douglas’ band.

Now, though, they’re a full-time band, having moved to New York together for optimal rehearsal and hang time. And with several months on the road together, Punch Brothers is establishing its own identity with some demanding and sometimes strange music. It took some time, though, Eldridge said, in part because people who knew Thile from Nickel Creek came to shows expecting something different.

“I think when we first came out of the chute, I think people were a little bit baffled,” Eldridge said in a phone interview this week. “I think they were expecting something very different. But now that the record has been out, and people kind of have expectations a little more in line with what we’re about … it’s not Nickel Creek, in other words … we’ve been out there for a little while now, and I really feel like we’re finding our own audience.

“And it’s really cool, to see people get into what we’re doing.”

The players were not unfamiliar with each other. In fact, it’s the same band that recorded Thile’s first post-Nickel Creek solo disc, “How to Grow a Woman From the Ground.” That was a straight-up bluegrass album — or as straight-up bluegrass as a guy like Thile gets. This time around, Thile wanted it to be a band, with traditional acoustic instruments and an experimental flavor.

So the new record, “Punch,” is taken up in large part by a four-movement piece, “The Blind Leaving the Blind,” which according to the band’s publicity is about Thile’s failed marriage. That might account for some of the dissonance it contains. The rest of the band was all for this classical, longform composition, Eldridge said.

“‘Blind’ was kind of his attempt to fuse formal and folk music together, and see if they could agree,” he said. “And then the remainder of the record, we wrote together … as a band, which is really kind of a great, rewarding experience, too.”

Must have been, because Eldridge left the steady rising Infamous Stringdusters, and his recent hometown, Nashville, Tenn., behind.

“I love the Stringdusters,” he said. “They’re a really great band and some of my very best friends. But, I was really excited to do something totally, totally different. Because I came up in a pretty bluegrassy background.”

More to the point, Eldridge comes from bluegrass royalty. Both his parents are banjo players. His father, Ben Eldridge, is a founding member of Northern Virginia bluegrass giants The Seldom Scene. Widely heralded, multi-dimensional guitarist Tony Rice is a family friend, and sits in often with the Scene. But Chris Eldridge —”Critter” is a childhood nickname, from the time he was “a little critter” — did what most kids do, eschewing the family tradition in favor of rock music and electric guitars.

“I think once I got to be a little bit older, I kind of rediscovered Tony Rice, who is the all-time hero of bluegrass guitar, I guess,” he said. “Tony Rice is really an artist. I don’t use that word lightly. There are a lot of people who are great musicians, but I feel like Tony Rice is an artist, because he really does incorporate so much into his music, and it’s still pretty rooted to the folk tradition.”

All the music he had grown up around — all the festivals, all the amazing musicians — came back to the surface. After a couple of years with the Stringdusters, he heard the call of the new once again. Now he’s looking forward to Punch Brothers’ future.

“Once we finally got together and started playing, it was a pretty special connection, a pretty special bond — musically and personally,” he said. “And it kind of became clear to us that we needed to make it more of a permanent thing.”