Black Pumas

You can’t call Black Pumas a retro act, per se: The sound is too atmospheric, too intoxicatingly imprecise, something more remembered than recreated. The work of an Austin-based studio rat (Adrian Quesada) and a vocalist trained in church and forged busking on the Santa Monica Pier (Eric Burton), *Black Pumas* is to late-’60s and early-’70s soul as Quentin Tarantino movies are to vintage exploitation: a studied look at the past from a place that could only be now. (To wit, Quesada has said the spark for the project came not from listening to old soul records, but Ghostface Killah—a vintage sound refracted through a contemporary lens.) Ominous (“Black Moon Rising”), uplifting (“Colors”), and gently psychedelic (“Sweet Conversations”), *Black Pumas* is the kind of album whose spirit lingers in the air like smoke.

Following their coronation as Best New Band at the 2019 Austin Music Awards, Black Pumas release their second single “Fire,” the follow-up to their Song Of The Year-winning “Black Moon Rising.” Black Pumas is led by the creative partnership between Grammy Award-winning guitarist / producer Adrian Quesada and 27-year-old songwriter Eric Burton. Burton is a relative newcomer who arrived in Austin in 2015 after busking his way across the country from Los Angeles, while Quesada has a storied reputation for playing in bands like Grupo Fantasma and Brownout while also producing acclaimed projects like 2018’s ‘Look At My Soul: The Latin Shade Of Texas Soul.’ After the two connected via friends in the Austin scene, they began to collaborate on a new sound that transmutes soul into something idiosyncratically modern. Reminiscent of Ghostface Killah and Motown in equal measure, this original sound ensured that Black Pumas’ weekly residency at C-Boys quickly became “the hottest party in town” (Austin-American Statesman).

The Austin-based duo don’t shy away from signifiers of the past, conjuring the sounds of the late 1960s and early 1970s without succumbing to pure nostalgic pandering.

Faintly psychedelic, wholeheartedly vintage-sounding Cali-Tex soul duo Black Pumas consist of multi-instrumentalist/producer Adrian Quesada and singer/guitarist Eric Burton.