The band's lead singer, Damian Kulash, met bassist Tim Nordwind at Interlochen Arts Camp near Traverse City, Michigan, when they were 11.

[26] The band's second album, Oh No, was recorded in Malmö, Sweden, in the fall of 2004 and was produced by Tore Johansson (the Cardigans, Franz Ferdinand) and mixed by Dave Sardy (Nine Inch Nails, Jet, System of a Down).

[12][27] Duncan was replaced by Andy Ross, who beat out 34 other guitarists who auditioned for the role, in a process that ended with each candidate being asked about their willingness to do a choreographed dance on stage.

Ross programmed a web application, hosted at a1000000ways.com, that allowed people to hear the single and to share it with their friends in exchange for free downloads from the iTunes music store.

[30][failed verification] The video for "A Million Ways" featured the band in a backyard performing a dance choreographed by lead singer Kulash's sister, Trish Sie.

[44] The title is taken from a line in David Bowie's "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide", a cover of which appears on the EP, along with renditions of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" and three songs from Oh No.

[43][46] On October 12, 2008, OK Go announced that the members had finished writing new songs for its third album and were in the studios in upstate New York with producer Dave Fridmann (the Flaming Lips, MGMT).

[47] The band previewed its third album, titled Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, with several dates on the U.S. East Coast, starting in Philadelphia on March 6, 2009, at the TLA Theatre.

[62] The band's most successful example of its new business model was taking money from State Farm Insurance, which was looking to tap into a younger audience by creating a piece of interesting digital content.

[63] The band created a music video for "This Too Shall Pass", in which a toy truck with State Farm branding was used to start a large Rube Goldberg machine built in a warehouse.

[65] Since that video, OK Go has employed a similar model in projects funded by Range Rover,[66] Yahoo,[67] Cisco,[68] Samsung,[69] Google Chrome,[70] Jose Cuervo,[71] and Chevrolet.

[81][82] The video for "Upside Down & Inside Out" was released on February 11, 2016, where the band perform the song while moving about in microgravity, with the aid of a reduced-gravity aircraft provided by the Russian S7 Airlines.

[90] After his recovery, while the band members were following stay-at-home orders at their homes, they wrote and recorded "All Together Now" and filmed a video for it over two months as a tribute to the healthcare workers battling the infection.

[100] Many of the videos use long or single-shot takes, which Salon's Matt Zoller Seitz claims "restore[s] a sense of wonder to the musical number by letting the performers' humanity shine through and allowing them to do their thing with a minimum of filmmaking interference".

[121] The band contributed a cover of the Zombies "This Will Be Our Year" as the lead track of Future Soundtrack for America, a political benefit album put out by Barsuk Records in the fall of 2004.

[134] In February 2015, the band was featured in a segment created to help children learn colors in a premiere for "The Cookie Thief", a Sesame Street movie special.

In June 2019, the band was featured in the Ripley's Believe It or Not television program on the Travel Channel, showing the making of the music video for their song "The One Moment".

The band composed a new original song titled "This" for the 2023 Apple TV movie The Beanie Bubble, directed by Kulash and his wife Kristin Gore.

The successful EP, which helped purchase a home for New Orleans musician Al "Carnival Time" Johnson, was the most public example of the band's increasing interest in politics and social issues, as the campaign included promotional appearances on Late Night with David Letterman as well as charity concerts.

[143] Lead singer Damian Kulash has written op-eds in The New York Times on digital rights management[144] and net neutrality,[145] an issue he also testified about in front of the House Judiciary Antitrust Task Force about in March 2008,[146] and also discussed with the FCC commissioner.

[154] On January 18, 2017, two days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States, OK Go released a cover of the politically charged Morrissey song "Interesting Drug".

The music video includes images of Trump and other prominent political figures as bad people and ends with a list of organizations the band recommends viewers support.

Fans of the band had mixed reactions, prompting this status update on OK GO's Facebook page: "Morrissey Official wrote this song almost 30 years ago but it seems truer to us now than ever.

"[155] In recent years, OK Go has worked on OK Go Sandbox to create music videos and educational tools with the Playful Learning Lab (a partnership with the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota).

[157] On December 31, 2005, the band performed surrounded by pyrotechnics and confetti on the Pontiac Garage Stage in New York City for the Times Square New Year's Eve Celebration.

[156] On February 4, 2008, OK Go headlined a fundraiser for the Barack Obama presidential campaign at Bowery Ballroom in New York City on the night before the Super Tuesday elections.

[159] On February 23, 2008, the band performed at the release party for Ben Karlin's collection of essays Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood.

[156] On May 6, 2010, The Baltimore Sun reported that OK Go was selling USB flash drives with recordings of each show on the Spring 2010 U.S. Tour[163] On May 23, 2010, the band performed live underwater on stage at Maker Faire in San Mateo California.

[169] In advance of the performance, the Kennedy Center invited 15 Twitter followers and guests to film the show, in order to produce the organization's first crowd-sourced concert video.

[171][172] On August 10, 2011, the band did a live television performance of the dance the members created with Pilobolus for their "All Is Not Lost" interactive video on the NBC show America's Got Talent[173] On January 31, 2012, OK Go appeared on the children's television show Sesame Street in a video called "3 Primary Colors" meant to teach the young audience about red, yellow, blue, and the colors made when you mix them.