Bishop Allen is an American indie rock band founded Brooklyn, New York, and currently based in Kingston. The band's core members are Justin Rice and Christian Rudder, who are supported both on stage and in the studio by a rotating cast of musical collaborators. The band was formed in 2003 and grew out of Rice and Rudder's friendship; it takes its name from Bishop Allen Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, named for Bishop Richard Allen, where the two lived together after attending Harvard University.

Bishop Allen has released four albums and 12 EPs; their second album, The Broken String, was released in July 2007, Grrr..., was released in March 2009, and after a five-year hiatus they released their most recent album Lights Out in August 2014.

Rice and Rudder attended Harvard University, where they were DJs on WHRB's punk/indie program, Record Hospital. While enrolled in the same English course, they struck up a conversation in class after seeing each other at a Jawbreaker show. The two formed a hardcore punk band called The Pissed Officers and self-released two split records with the then Boston-based Casio-core duo Gerty Farish. Rudder also played briefly in a Devo tribute band with members of Gerty Farish and Fat Day. After The Pissed-Officers broke up, Justin and Christian formed a band called Depeche Mode. "The other Depeche Mode seemed long gone at the time," Rice said, "so we figured the name was up for grabs." After the real Depeche Mode came back, the band became Bishop Allen. Some years later, Rudder and Rice took up residence at a house in Lynchburg, Virginia with Kate Dollenmayer where they began to record the music for their first album as Bishop Allen.

Charm School was Bishop Allen's first record. Recorded in fits and starts over two years, it grew song-by-song as Rice and Rudder wrote and played in their spare time. They recorded all the instruments on the album's 13 songs themselves, using drum loops to hide the fact that neither is a drummer, and almost everything on the record was recorded one track at a time in an ordinary bedroom. Backing vocals by Bonnie Schiff-Glenn and Kate Dollenmayer and supplementary drums by Coll Anderson, all added in the album's final stages, completed the songs.

After the album was finished, Ms. Schiff-Glenn and Margaret Miller were recruited to play with Bishop Allen live, and their pictures were then featured on Charm School's back cover. Jack Delamitraux and Christian Owens later joined the band on the tours supporting Charm School's release.

The record came out in May 2003 and received many favorable reviews, most notably from Rolling Stone and NPR's Weekend Edition. The album was released under the band's own Champagne School imprint.

In 2006, Bishop Allen recorded and released an EP every month of the year. Each record was titled for the month of its release (January, February, and so on), and, with the exception of August, which was a 14-song live disc, each contained four new studio songs.

The project began when Rice and Rudder stumbled upon a discarded piano, dragged it into their rehearsal studio and, refreshed by the sounds the keyboard added to their repertoire, put their old works-in-progress aside and began writing new songs. They soon began recording this new material, and by the time the January EP was completed on January 25, 2006, they had decided on doing one each month for the rest of the year. The January EP begins with the song "Corazon", celebrating the rescue of the piano, and features a piano on the cover.