Why something completely new can sometimes feel remarkably like coming home
Sometimes you hear a band for the first time and the surprising thing is not how new it sounds, but how strangely familiar it feels, as though the music had already existed somewhere in the background of your life and had merely waited for the right moment to introduce itself properly.
That was my first reaction to Black Pumas.
I had started with a live studio performance of OCT 33, without knowing much about the band and, because the video initially showed me little more than the rather beautiful artwork, without even knowing what the musicians looked like.
There was therefore nothing visual to influence me, no charismatic singer standing in the middle of a carefully staged room, no facial expression telling me what I was supposed to feel and no fashionable lighting department trying to convince me that something profound was happening.
There was simply the music, which is occasionally still the nicest way to encounter music, although YouTube seems increasingly determined to make sure that we first encounter a thumbnail, three advertisements and somebody asking us to subscribe.
What caught me immediately was its simplicity.
A song that does not need to prove anything
Musically, OCT 33 is built around a very simple descending chord walkdown which repeats throughout large parts of the song, including the verses and what I would usually call the chorus, although in this case the whole piece flows so naturally that these traditional labels almost feel more useful to the person writing down the arrangement than to the person listening to it. There is no harmonic labyrinth, no rhythmic obstacle course and certainly nothing requiring a calculator or an advanced degree in Bulgarian time signatures.
Under less capable hands, such a progression could easily become monotonous. It could turn into musical wallpaper, pleasant enough while it lasts but forgotten before the final chord has fully disappeared. Here, however, the repetition does something completely different, because instead of demanding attention it creates trust. After a few bars, the listener knows where the music is going, and precisely because there is no danger of the song suddenly performing an unnecessary somersault merely to demonstrate that it can, the mind begins to relax and listen to the things that actually matter.
The voice, first of all.
There is a quality in Eric Burton’s singing that I find difficult to describe without immediately drifting into the usual vocabulary of soul, warmth and emotion, all of which would be accurate but somehow still fail to explain why it works so well. He does not seem to be trying to persuade me that he feels the song. He simply sounds as though he does, which is a subtle but rather important distinction, because the first asks for admiration while the second creates connection.
Around him, the arrangement remains remarkably restrained. There is a small drum kit, a bass, backing vocals and an electric guitar that has apparently resisted the temptation to apply for a management position. Nobody appears interested in making the song unnecessarily impressive, and yet it gradually becomes exactly that, mainly because the strings enter and lift the entire arrangement into something much larger without ever destroying its intimacy.
The violins do not arrive like an invading army. They do not announce that the emotional part has now officially begun. They simply expand what was already there, adding drama to an arrangement that remains, at its core, astonishingly modest. It is one of those musical decisions that sounds obvious after someone else has made it, which is usually a reliable sign that it was not obvious at all.
Then I saw the musicians
After OCT 33, YouTube did what YouTube occasionally does rather well and led me directly to another Black Pumas performance, this time a live session of Colors. It was there that I saw the musicians for the first time, and what I saw confirmed almost exactly what I believed I had already heard.
They looked completely at home.
Not careless, not bored and certainly not indifferent, but settled into the music with the kind of calm assurance that only becomes possible when everybody in the room knows precisely what they are doing and, perhaps even more importantly, knows what they do not need to do.
The backing singers do not compete with the lead vocal. The rhythm section does not constantly remind us that it exists. The guitar offers colour rather than commentary, and the drummer plays the song instead of playing the drums, which is not nearly as common as one might hope. Everybody contributes, but nobody appears to be applying for the position of most important person in the room.
That, I think, was the moment in which I finally understood what had attracted me from the beginning.
It was not merely simplicity.
It was confidence.
The sound of confidence
Confidence is one of those qualities that becomes less visible the more genuinely someone possesses it. Insecurity, by contrast, often arrives with excellent lighting and a PowerPoint presentation.
Musical confidence does not necessarily mean playing difficult things, although Black Pumas are obviously capable musicians.
It means trusting a simple idea enough not to decorate it until nobody can remember what the original idea was. It means playing one note when five would be available and understanding that the other four are not therefore wasted. It means allowing silence, repetition and familiarity to do some of the work.
Above all, it means trusting the song.
The band never sounds as though it is worried that we might become bored, and because they are not worried, neither am I. They do not drag me through the arrangement by the wrist, pointing excitedly at every clever detail. They simply begin playing, and within a few moments I feel strangely safe in their company.
The phrase that came to me while listening was that one could listen along “without danger”, which admittedly sounds rather dramatic for a soul band that has not threatened anyone. But I know exactly what I meant.
Some music keeps the listener slightly alert because it might change direction at any moment, become louder, more complex or more demanding. That can be exciting, and I genuinely enjoy music that challenges me, but there are other moments in which I do not want to be challenged. I want to be carried. I want to know that the musicians have control of the vehicle and that nobody is suddenly going to hand me the steering wheel.
Black Pumas create that feeling almost immediately.
Like cake at Grandma’s house
The closest comparison I can find has very little to do with music and quite a lot to do with cake.
It feels like visiting your grandmother and discovering that she has made the simple cake you have loved since childhood, the one which exists nowhere else in quite the same form, even though the recipe is probably neither secret nor particularly complicated. You already know what it will taste like before the first bite, and that knowledge does not diminish the pleasure in the slightest. It is the pleasure.
There is comfort in familiarity, particularly when that familiarity has been earned through consistency rather than manufactured through boredom. You know what is coming, you know how it will feel, and you also know that nobody has suddenly decided to reinterpret the cake as a deconstructed foam accompanied by rosemary smoke and a short lecture about texture.
It is simply cake.
And it is wonderful.
That was the strange experience I had with Black Pumas. They were completely new to me, and yet the music immediately carried the emotional familiarity of something I had known for years. The chord progression did not surprise me. The arrangement did not try to outsmart me. The band did not appear remotely interested in redefining music history before dinner.
Still, I could have listened for hours.
Simple does not mean easy
There is, of course, a danger in calling music simple, because people occasionally confuse simplicity with a lack of ability or ambition, when the opposite is often closer to the truth. A complicated arrangement can hide many things. A simple one exposes almost everything.
When a song is built on a repeating progression, every weakness becomes visible. The timing matters more. The tone matters more. The spaces between the notes matter more. The singer cannot hide behind a constantly changing harmonic landscape, and the musicians cannot rely on novelty to maintain the listener’s attention.
They have to mean it.
This is probably why true simplicity is so difficult. It requires enough confidence to remove things rather than continually adding them, and enough musical maturity to understand that restraint is not the absence of expression but one of its most powerful forms.
The same is probably true outside music, although that thought only occurred to me after the songs had finished and I was still sitting there, feeling rather more peaceful than I had a few minutes earlier.
We often confuse visible effort with value. We assume that complicated solutions must be better because they look as though somebody worked very hard on them, and perhaps they did. Yet some of the most convincing people I have met, much like the most convincing musicians, are those who no longer need to display every part of their ability at once.
They know what they can do. That knowledge is enough.
A new band that already feels like home
I am still at the beginning of discovering Black Pumas, which is a rather pleasant place to be, because there is now an entire catalogue waiting for me and the first two songs have already created the feeling that I know roughly what sort of company I have entered.
Not what every song will sound like, obviously, and I hope there will be plenty of surprises, but what kind of musical attitude I can expect. I expect musicians who listen to one another, arrangements that serve the song rather than decorate the performers and a voice that can carry emotion without having to underline it in red.
Most of all, I expect that strange feeling of comfort again.
The feeling of hearing something for the first time and nevertheless recognising it, rather like walking into a room you have never visited and immediately knowing where you would like to sit.
Perhaps that is the sound of confidence.
Not loudness, complexity or perfection, but the quiet assurance of people who know what the music needs and have the good manners not to give it anything else.
And perhaps that is also why Black Pumas felt a little like Grandma’s cake: simple, familiar, completely unpretentious and so confidently itself that, after the first taste, the only reasonable reaction is to settle in and ask whether there might be another piece.
Links
Black Pumas YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRDsZrz6ihdlxUDeUei4g6w
Black Pumas Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/blackpumas/?hl=de
