The Budos Band Returns With Newly Announced VII, First Single “Overlander”
New York’s beloved funk/soul/afrobeat/doom metal fusion pioneers The Budos Band have announced their latest return to the arena of recorded music, with the upcoming release of newly announced seventh LP VII. Out May 30 on the band’s own Diamond West label–they were previously on Daptone for many years–it’s the first album recorded in the newly built Diamond West studio in LA, and the first overall Budos Band release since 2023 EP Frontier’s Edge. It’s closer to five years since the last full Budos LP, 2020’s Long in the Tooth. In honor of the occasion–and the band’s 20th anniversary, given that they first coalesced in Staten Island in 2005–they’ve released first single “Overlander” from VII, which you can listen to below.
For those keeping score at home, the naming convention here amusingly keeps to the band’s consistently inconsistent ways: The progression of their full-length albums now goes The Budos Band I, II, III, Burnt Offering, V, Long in the Tooth, and now VII. What can you do but shrug and chuckle? We’ve been fans of the band’s unique fusion of diabolical, “horn-spiked grooves” and rock ‘n roll for a long time, and I even wrote a list of the best Budos tracks back in 2018. The band’s evolution has been fairly steady but not quite linear, having started out with inspirations that drew more heavily from classic American funk and vintage afrobeat, into a sound that more often incorporated crunching electric guitars and heavy metal backbone from the time of fourth album Burnt Offering onward. The band says that VII takes some inspiration from Burnt Offering in particular, running the gamut from “hard-hitting funk workouts,” to “Turkish psych,” to “Zambian rock” according to the announcement press release. Says saxophonist Jared Tankel in a statement:
“That’s the genreless aspect of the band. We’re not Afrobeat, we’re not Ethiopian jazz. We’re not world music. We’re not really funk, we’re not soul. We’re not rock. We’re just an amalgam of all these different sounds, so things pop out in all directions when you listen.”