Jeremiah Green, a founding member and drummer of US rock band Modest Mouse, died on Saturday after recently being diagnosed with cancer.

“I don’t know a way to ease into this: Today we lost our dear friend Jeremiah,” Modest Mouse wrote on its Instagram account. “He laid down to rest and simply faded out”.

Last week, frontman Isaac Brock confirmed that Green had been “diagnosed with cancer a short while ago” without going into specifics of his condition. It was also said that Green had pulled out of a tour because he had stage 4 cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy.

Green, 45, helped found the post-grunge outfit in the early nineties in Washington state but soon they became a fixture of the less abrasive Portland, Oregon, music scene.

Their staple, songs described by Spin magazine in 2000 as being “about being stranded in boom-time America”, made them what it called an “indie torch-bearer”. Green and Brock had originally met on the way to a free meal sponsored by a group of followers of the Hare Krishna movement.

The magazine described the band as a rare thing – “a charismatic rock band from the chaste upper north-west indie scene”. The article described the mice, other than Brock, as “quieter than Belle and Sebastian’s doorbell”.

“I’d rather hide out than be the center of attention,” Green told the magazine.

As their name suggested, they came from modest beginnings, and had rehearsed their music in a shed. In 1996, the band released the song This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About and, a year later, the album that is commonly regarded as their finest, The Lonesome Crowded West.

It wasn’t until 2004’s Good News for People Who Love Bad News that Modest Mouse broke through to the mainstream. Though Green was not on that album, and Modest Mouse went through numerous lineup changes, he had been a consistent member.