Sinuous grooves and heated horns come hand-in-hand with Staten Island’s Budos Band, as their many fans — Madonna, Iggy Pop, and the Wu-Tang Clan among them — know well. The eight-piece group has spent the last 15 years making instrumental music that defies easy comparison, mixing retro organs with arcs of brass, deadly strings, and stark percussion. Their style falls somewhere between 1960s spy thriller soundtrack and 1970s Ethiojazz, and yet is continuously cutting-edge, a signature sound unlike any other.
The new track, “The Wrangler”, exemplifies that. Out ahead of album Long in the Tooth, coming out 9 October on Daptone Records, it’s as urgent a tune as the band has ever given us. “When we set out to record this album, we didn’t know we would be releasing it during such a dark and ominous period in our history,” the band notes. “‘The Wrangler’ emanates the grand perception of apocalypse we are currently experiencing.”