Like many artists creating music these past two years, Buffalo Daughter’s original plan to put out a new album was derailed by the pandemic. The trio instead took a proactive approach to the unexpected extra time.
“We had an extra six months to work on our album,” Sugar Yoshinaga tells The Japan Times from her home office, with several guitars visible in the background of the video chat and a pet bird chirping in occasionally. “Besides getting the chance to put the finishing touches on what we made, we recorded about two or three new songs. The songs we worked on before (the pandemic) were focused on our frustrations with the world, so with this extra recording time we emphasized our appreciation for music.”
The gratitude the band shows toward its art and the accompanying optimism provide an emotional boost to “We Are the Times,” Buffalo Daughter’s first new album in seven years. Those late-stage positive vibes, apparent on tracks such as opener “Music,” which references being in quarantine, serve as an exception to the rest of the album, which Yoshinaga and her bandmates, Yumiko Ohno and Moog Yamamoto, use to touch on serious issues such as isolation (“Loop,” “ET [Densha]”) and climate change (“Global Warming Kills Us All”). Ohno and Yoshinaga say that the frustration stemming from these problems was present prior to the pandemic.
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