Free Radicals' live band includes six or seven members.
On recordings—The Rising Tide Sinks All (1998), Our Lady of Eternal Sunny Delights (2000), and Aerial Bombardment (2004)—Free Radicals invites a group of 50 or more musicians and vocalists into the studio.
Drummer Nick Cooper founded the group in 1996, with a goal of specializing in improvised music. In 2000, The New Yorker wrote "The horn-heavy, continually evolving collective Free Radicals produces a wildly eclectic fusion that has as many influences as there are items in the Houston, Texas, pawnshop in which they honed their sound during all-night jam sessions." In 2010, Dawn (newspaper) wrote that the artwork and message about underwater oil-leaks, oil-wars, and bank-crashes on the band's first CD was like a "premonition waiting to become true."
Free Radicals performs many concerts, marches and fund-raisers for anti-authoritarian and radical groups like food not bombs, peace festivals, and charities events including a continuous 24-hour concert in November 1999 to raise money for Kid Care, a health program for children. They have protested against Halliburton, and participated in marches for immigrants' rights and for a Houston janitor's union.
The band is recording a fourth studio album.