Founders of The Low Anthem, Ben Knox Miller and Jeffrey Prystowsky, met as DJs doing college radio. Jocie Adams (Arc Iris ) joined the band at an early stage. They recorded Low Anthem's first LP, What The Crow Brings, in their third floor apartment in Providence in 2007, using a single microphone for most tracks, and self-released it, dumpster diving for empty cereal boxes to fold into album sleeves, creating the silkscreens for the album art, and hand painting and serial-numbering 600 copies of the album.

At Newport Folk Festival in 2008, Miller and Prystowsky joined the recycling crew to get backstage and handed out copies of Oh My God Charlie Darwin (Standard) to Jay Sweet (of Paste Magazine), the festival's director, hoping to catch a break. Paste featured the record in an upcoming issue. Sweet booked them for the next year's festival. The band signed with Nonesuch Records and played the festival circuit the following summer, headlining shows in Europe.

The first band to take them out on tour was Surprise Me Mr. Davis, a side project of The Barr Brothers and later went on the road with The Avett Brothers, Timber Timbre, Iron & Wine, Lucinda Williams and others. In 2012 they opened for Bruce Springsteen, joining him on stage for the show's finale--a cover of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land."

They built their own studio in Providence in an old vaudeville theater and continue making music and touring, having signed with JNR in 2018 to release their latest The Salt Doll Went to Measure the Depth of the Sea.