Lord Buffalo was formed in 2012 in Austin following the dissolution of Daniel Jesse Pruitt’s former band The Hot Pentecostals. The band released its debut EP in 2012, recorded a Daytrotter Session that same year, and in the time since has performed live as direct support for artists as diverse as Roky Erickson, Dead Meadow, Bonnie Prince Billy, Phosphorescent, Wovenhand, and Thee Silver Mount Zion. With its spacious soft/loud dynamics and violin drone, Lord Buffalo is often the loudest band on folk night and the softest on a metal bill, never failing to hold their own and make the dichotomy feel effortless.
Lord Buffalo will release its new LP, Tohu Wa Bohu, on March 27th via Blues Funeral Recordings. Recorded in Lockhart, TX with producer Danny Reisch (Chelsea Wolfe, Okkervil River) and mastered by Dave Shirk (Mastodon, Sun Ra), the album is the follow-up to the folk-psych group’s 2017 self-titled full length, an opus hailed as “widescreen Panavision, as sweeping and pretty as it is harshly powerful” by The Big Takeover.
An unsettling ride through open plains and melancholic Midwestern imagery, Tohu Wa Bohu is thick with a captivating, restless intensity and brooding heaviness of the soul. The band’s songs explore experimental, psychedelic instrumentation driven by ghostly, ambient tracks of metallic guitars, thundering drums, eerie violin strings, windswept arrangements, canyon echos and the emotive, melancholic voice of front man Daniel Jesse Pruitt. With its haunting trance and spacious soundscapes, the record plays across multiple genres, taking cues equally from Morricone and Badalementi as well as Sabbath and Swans. The word Tohu-wa-bohu can be translated as both a void/emptiness and chaos/disorder, each paring more than apt descriptors of Lord Buffalo’s powerful, ominous sound. The group tackles the fears of looming end times not with analysis and commentary but by an embrace of the feeling of oblivion in all its incomprehensible majesty.
Today Glide is excited to premiere “Wild Hunt”, one of the standout tracks on the new album. Firing off with an ominous pounding of the piano, Pruitt layers in his dramatic vocals gradually before the band drops into a dark and heavy groove. With a percussive blast that could fill canyons, the song gallops forward into an abyss of distortion. By the time the band makes it to the bridge, they are firing on all cylinders with a thick, atmospheric wall of noise. That’s not to say the song isn’t melodic, because Pruitt’s vocals alongside dagger-sharp riffing fashion the song into a stark and brutal expedition of post-Americana.
Vocalist and guitarist Daniel Jesse Pruitt shares the inspiration behind the song:
“‘Wild Hunt’ is coming to terms with something, the what isn’t in focus so much as the how. This song grasps, it clutches, it pulls. The ‘Tohu Wa Bohu’ sessions were very much about that kind of discovery, finding space for authentic responses to emerge. So when we were recording “Wild Hunt”, I had not yet worked out all the vocal ideas. Garrett was overdubbing some guitar and the engineer set up a mic so I could experiment while the track was rolling, really not thinking we’d keep any of it. The first take is the one on the record. It just came out like that and we didn’t second guess it. I love how the piano sounds on this one. The studio had just acquired this amazing old Steinway grand and we pounded it (lovingly) to make that huge percussive sound.”
LISTEN:
Lord Buffalo will release Tohu Wa Bohu on March 27th. PRE-ORDER
