There is a specific kind of band that forms inside a music conservatory, where people who have spent years developing technical facility on classical instruments discover simultaneously that the music they actually want to make has almost nothing to do with the canon they have been studying and everything to do with the records they have been listening to in their rooms at night. Buddy Rogers began exactly this way at the Crane School of Music in Potsdam, New York, where classical guitarists Jared Wentrick and Aaron Benowitz found their way to drummer Bastien Gleich and keyboardist Tom Loomis, four musicians with serious formal training and a shared intuition that the most interesting thing they could do with that training was to take it somewhere the curriculum had not planned for. The result of that initial convergence, years of development across multiple time zones and one upstate New York Airbnb, is Heavy One, the seven-track EP released April 25, 2026, and it is the kind of record that rewards knowing its history without requiring that history to make sense of it.
The EP’s central track, BRJ Don’t Blink, contains within its biography a compressed account of how Buddy Rogers works as a creative entity. Benowitz wrote it originally as a jazz-fusion instrumental at Crane, the classical guitar training informing its harmonic sophistication without constraining its energy. It sat in that form until Wentrick added words and vocals, and Benowitz reinvented the main guitar riff into something fuzzier and more present, more psychedelic in the best contemporary sense of that word. The song about Jeff Bezos’s 2021 space flight and the Amazon workers who could not afford dental care was once a wordless instrumental exercise. The transformation it underwent between those two states tells you almost everything about what makes this band interesting, the willingness to take something technically accomplished and make it human, to add the weight of actual concern about actual things to a harmonic structure that could have remained comfortable and abstract.
The Bezos moment deserves its own examination because the lyrical instinct it reveals in Wentrick is genuinely sharp. The billionaire’s speech thanking every Amazon employee for funding the rocket was one of those public statements so tone-deaf it became immediately and permanently memorable, and the image of a worker who cannot afford a root canal watching that speech from whatever economic reality they occupied that year is the kind of specific juxtaposition that good political songwriting uses rather than grand rhetorical gestures. BRJ Don’t Blink is not an angry protest song in the traditional mode. It is something more uncomfortably accurate than that, a song about the low-grade anxiety of living in a world where the news is a constant barrage of interconnected catastrophes, microplastics in everything, oceans rising, heat building, billionaires in space, dental pain in the background, compartmentalized into something manageable because the alternative is paralysis. The catharsis of writing and performing the song is what Wentrick describes, and that cathartic function is audible in the track itself, music as the place where the thing that cannot be held anymore finally finds somewhere to go.
The sonic influences shaping the EP are chosen with the taste of people who have genuinely absorbed rather than simply appreciated what they are working from. Childish Gambino’s Awaken My Love is the named primary influence, the psychedelic R&B and soul of that record informing the chorus of BRJ Don’t Blink in particular, the laid back soulful guitar work and the occasional envelope filter doing the kind of subtle work that rewards careful listening without demanding it. The gritty and saturated sound of Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Tame Impala provides the textural context for how the EP approaches distortion and warmth in its production palette, a vintage-adjacent sonic character that feels lived-in rather than retro, familiar without being nostalgic in the passive sense.
The production approach across Heavy One is as DIY as an EP made by four people spread across California, the UK, Vermont, and New York can be, which is to say completely. Jared’s analogue gear from kit companies MicParts and DIYre is part of the sonic character of the recording in a way that goes beyond technical specification, the particular warmth and idiosyncrasy of DIY analogue gear contributing a texture that professional studio equipment often deliberately avoids. Recording happened in the rented Airbnb in upstate New York, a large open room with tall ceilings and angular walls that the band set up in and used for the days they were all in the same physical space. Most of the post-production happened remotely, across time zones, four people in different parts of the world finishing something that began in the same room at a music school in Potsdam years earlier.
The inclusion of the 2018 Potsdam demos on the EP is one of Heavy One’s most interesting structural decisions and one of its most emotionally revealing. Buddy Rogers Jefferson, the 2018 demo of the track that became BRJ Don’t Blink in its fully realized form, and Rubber Daniels, the 2018 demo of Near/Far, sit at the EP’s close as documents of where the songs began, before the words arrived and the riff got fuzzier and the band dispersed to California and the UK and Vermont. Placing these earlier versions in conversation with the finished tracks allows the listener to hear the distance the songs have traveled, the jazz-fusion instrumental becoming the psychedelic R&B song about space tourism and workers who need dental care, the earlier draft becoming the later truth. It is an honest and generous artistic choice, the kind that bands make when they are more interested in the story of the work than in appearing to have arrived fully formed.
How Was Your Day? opens the EP with the kind of question that sounds simple and is not, the everyday inquiry that carries inside it everything about connection and its difficulties, the gap between what we ask and what we actually want to know. You Can Tell Me Anything follows with a similar emotional register, the relational territory that runs through the EP’s lyrical concerns alongside the broader cultural anxieties of BRJ Don’t Blink. Near/Far, existing in its 2026 recorded form alongside the 2018 Potsdam demo, gives the listener the comparative perspective that the demos section creates across the EP’s final movement. Two Weeks as an instrumental provides a moment of pure sonic statement, the band’s classical backgrounds and psychedelic influences allowed to operate without the lyrical layer, demonstrating that what Buddy Rogers builds instrumentally is sufficient to hold attention on its own terms.
The EP title Heavy One is understated in the way that the best titles often are, the heaviness it describes not the heaviness of volume or distortion but the weight of the things the songs are carrying, the anxiety and the frustration and the distance between a rocket ship and a root canal, processed through music because music is where the weight can finally be put down long enough to examine it.
Four people, multiple time zones, one shared beginning in Potsdam, and a fuzz pedal that changed everything. That is the Buddy Rogers story, and Heavy One tells it with more care and intelligence than most bands manage across an entire career.
Author: Tigran Sh.
