Relient K are an Ohio band, which is easy to forget. Matt Thiessen, Matt Hoopes and Brian Pittman started it as high school students in Canton in 1998 and named it after Hoopes' car, a Plymouth Reliant K, with the spelling bent. Gotee, the Christian label, put out the early records and kept handling them in that market, and pop-punk fans found them through albums like The Anatomy of the Tongue in Cheek (2001), Two Lefts Don't Make a Right...But Three Do (2003) and Mmhmm (2004), the album that carried "Be My Escape." Capitol picked the band up for the mainstream push around 2007's Five Score and Seven Years Ago.
These days they come out selectively. A 2014 tour marked ten years of Mmhmm. In 2025 they played a secret show at Brown's Diner in Nashville and returned to the Alive Music Festival at Atwood Lake Park, back in northeast Ohio. Sonic Temple's billing calls their Sunday set a rare show.