Eric Burton (left) and Adrian Quesada in Nashville. The two musicians, who make up psychedelic-soul duo Black Pumas, are up for a Grammy.
David McClisterBlack Pumas’ journey to the Grammys began with a potentially awkward phone call. In late 2017, long-standing Austin-based guitarist and producer Adrian Quesada needed a singer for some new instrumentals he’d been recording. On the recommendation of a mutual friend, he left a message for a local talent, Eric Burton, who had virtually no track record in the business. Burton hadn’t heard of Quesada, either, and he didn’t bother to call back — until some friends clued him in to Quesada’s high-end reputation. “They said, ‘Dude, hit that guy back up,’” recalls Burton. “They kind of scoffed at me for leaving him hanging for so long.” Finally, Burton dialed the number — “I felt, ‘Hey, this could be an opportunity to make some money’” — and Quesada, who was driving at the time, answered. “He sang over the phone, and I couldn’t hear him that well,” Quesada says. “But his passion and energy were so contagious.”
This unlikely pairing of two men 13 years apart in age, and coming from very different musical backgrounds, paid off: At this year’s Grammy Awards, Black Pumas will be competing in the Best New Artist category against the formidable likes of Lizzo, Billie Eilish, Lil Nas X, Yola, Maggie Rogers, and Rosalia, all of whom have sold more records than Black Pumas have. “I don’t even know how we made it onto [the list],” says Burton. “We feel like this is a battle against a bunch of Goliaths. It really is kind of mind-boggling.”
Then again, surprise twists are part of the group’s DNA. Growing up in Laredo, Texas, Quesada ignored his parents’ music in favor of hip-hop and hair-metal. He moved to Austin to study art in college, playing guitar in a punk-jazz act, the Blue Noise Band, before circling back to Mexican dance music from the Fifties and Sixties. Eventually, he and his group joined forces with another, more funk-oriented local band, the Blimp, to form Grupo Fantasma.
Quesada would log nearly 15 years with that limber, multi-faceted group, who played a cool, jacked-up version of traditional music. Their reputation growing, Grupo Fantasma were recruited by Prince for a series of dates at his Glam Slam club; Prince also jammed with them at a few VIP gigs in 2007. And in 2011, after losing out on an earlier Grammy, Grupo walked away with an award for Best Latin Rock, Alternative or Urban Album for 2010’s El Existential.
Even when he was in the band, Quesada was restless; early on, he started a harder, more metallic side project, Brownout, which released a bunch of Black Sabbath covers under the name Brown Sabbath. In the years after Grupo Fantasma’s Grammy win, Quesada reached a point where he felt he had to leave his musical mothership for good, in part due to the group’s rigorous road work. “I was starting to have a hard time committing to that schedule,” he says. “More than that, it was just a very specific palette. It was difficult [to leave], honestly, because it had turned into a family. But I never felt like the primary songwriter or anything, and if I was going to invest that much time in anything, I want to be more directly involved. It was time.”
For another side project, Quesada joined up with My Morning Jacket drummer Patrick Hallahan in the one-off band Spanish Gold in 2014. But he remained in search of an indefinable sound to call his own, and had begun working on his own instrumentals with local musicians when Burton entered the picture.
Burton’s story had started across the country, in Los Angeles. Living in a religious household with his mother in the San Fernando Valley, he heard more gospel than pop music. “I grew up kind of sheltered through the church,” he says. “As far as secular music, I just heard what was on the radio while we were doing chores.” The rare non-gospel record he remembers from that time is Pras’ 1998 hit “Ghetto Supastar”; his first CD purchase was 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’. (Though not a huge hip-hop fan, he loved 50’s catchy tunes.)
As part of his high school’s theater-geek crowd, Burton envisioned himself an actor, and thanks to an industry connection, he landed a bit part in the music-themed Keira Knightley/Mark Ruffalo movie Begin Again in 2013. Through that, he met former New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander, who encouraged Burton’s music side. After a brief trip to college in Arizona, Burton wound up back in L.A, selling T-shirts while busking on the Santa Monica Pier. He and two musician friends played up and down the West Coast before driving to Austin, where Burton decided to stay.
When he first heard Burton’s name suggested as a possible collaborator, Quesada was perplexed. “I looked him up, and the first thing I thought was, ‘How have I not heard of this guy?’” says Quesada, who watched YouTube videos of Burton singing in clubs. “I pride myself on knowing. But I thought it was awesome. I love that I had no preconceived notions of this guy.”
When the two finally met at Quesada’s Austin studio, it became immediately clear that they could complement each other. Burton’s smooth but gritty voice and original songs, like his rainbow-themed “Colors” (“My sisters and my brothers/See ’em like no other”), fit alongside the tracks Quesada had already cut, which were heavy on old-school electric pianos, live drums, and Quesada’s rumbly surf guitar. Quesada enhanced the classic-soul mood by introducing his younger collaborator to vintage R&B. “It made me want to go back and listen and figure out how to project the way Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye could,” Burton says. “Adrian really appreciated the tonality of my voice and the way I was reaching to embody these older artists that fit the canvas he was giving to me.”
Quesada agrees, but begs off the old-school comparisons. “We didn’t really set out to be a soul revival band or anything like that,” he says. “I wanted the soul to be that it came from our souls, not so much a carbon copy of any particular era or artists.”
Soon enough, the duo had a name, Black Pumas, inspired by Quesada’s fascination with jaguars (his studio has a jaguar logo) and a play on the Black Panthers. The moment of creative truth came on stage, when they debuted their act at an Austin club. “I remember telling my wife not to come — give us a few weeks, because it might suck the first couple of times,” Quesada recalls. Quesada assumed Burton would be seated with his guitar, but to his — and Burton’s — surprise, the singer opted to stand up and perform, drawing on his theatrical background. “When I got to put the guitar down, I found it was very freeing,” says Burton. “It elevated what we were doing.”
“Everything I had ever seen, Eric was playing troubadour, singer-songwriter style with a guitar,” says Quesada. “I didn’t even know that he had James Brown-level frontman chops. As soon as we stepped off the stage the first time, we pulled each other aside and said, ‘There’s a spark here.’”
From there, buzz began building. Black Pumas released “Black Moon Rising” on Spotify, scored a single deal and then a full-album contract with ATO Records (the label co-founded by Dave Matthews and currently home to My Morning Jacket, Brittany Howard, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard). About a year ago, they scored a Best New Band award at the Austin Music Awards and released their debut, Black Pumas, a few months later.
Next came the band’s left-field Grammy nomination, which remains a mystery, even to those who work with the band. “I have no idea how that happened,” says ATO head Jon Salter, who submitted the band’s record for consideration but heard nothing more until the nomination was announced. “Maybe they wanted some guitar rock in there.” Sales certainly weren’t a factor: To date, Black Pumas has only sold around 23,000 combined physical and digital copies, according to Alpha Data.
But Quesada’s Grammy history didn’t hurt, and it’s also likely the group benefited from the Recording Academy’s secretive blue-ribbon panel, which whittles down dozens of nominees in the four leading categories to ensure those categories retain a patina of cool. “When the nominations came out and I saw Black Pumas, I said, ‘What the fuck? This makes no sense,'” says a label executive who participates in the Grammy process. “I pride myself in knowing every record that comes out and listening to everything. But then I thought about it and I thought, ‘That’s kind of cool.’ They and Yola are really good acts.” (The Recording Academy declined to comment on the process.)
The Puma’s next stop will be Los Angeles for the awards show. Quesada already has one Grammy appearance under his belt, for Grupo Fantasma’s first nomination. But for Burton, whose last day job was delivering packages for Amazon for $150 a day, the trip and the A-list competition are a reminder that he’s now in much bigger leagues than he even imagined. “I still can’t believe we’re part of the conversation, because we haven’t been a band very long,” says Burton. “I’ve had to be more professional, or else I’m going to get fired.”
Based in London, vocalist and DJ iKeda already appears to be following the path of a major pop act, although she is hesitant to accept that description. “These days, it’s just too easy to call someone a pop star,” she tells NME during a conversation in the sunshine at a Hackney pub garden. With her newest EP ‘Bangs N Braces’ almost here, she insists that such recognition should be deserved. “You really need to earn your stripes to have that label. Someone like PinkPantheress or Addison Rae, they’re building a whole image and world – those are true pop stars.”
Although she has yet to reach the same heights as those artists, her career is clearly gaining momentum. Since 2024, she has released songs combining the irresistible energy of UK funky, electroclash and dancehall, while becoming a familiar face across the London underground electropop scene. One of her biggest opportunities arrived earlier this year when she was invited to open for PinkPantheress during the celebrated ‘Fancy That’ tour, an experience she describes as “almost like a dream”.
“I just couldn’t believe I was playing venues that size at this point in my career,” she recalls. Instead of allowing those initial worries to overwhelm her, she transformed them into “super healing positive energy” and committed herself to delivering the strongest performances possible. “I told myself that I was asked to do this for a reason, that I need to take the audience reception as actual constructive criticism and not crash out. It was too amazing an opportunity not to go one hundred per cent full throttle.”
With a tequila soda in hand, iKeda discusses a musical palette shaped by everyone from Santigold to SOPHIE. However, much of her creativity is fuelled by the trusted circle of friends and artists around her. Fellow club scene regular Babymorocco encouraged her to try songwriting in 2024, leading to her debut single ‘Luv Drunk’: “It was such a far-away concept, going into the studio and writing, but he started doing it, and I saw how quickly he got good.”
Her childhood was divided between Tottenham’s “concrete jungle” and life aboard a houseboat in the peaceful surroundings of Cambridge, giving iKeda an early instinct for creating stories. During her teenage years, she tried her hand at short fiction before studying visual art at Central Saint Martins. “It’s so powerful when you can take something into your own hands and write these things which you wish could happen in real life,” she says while discussing why visuals remain so essential to her creative identity. “I love just being in a world when I’m listening to music.”
That sense of entering another reality sits at the heart of ‘Bangs N Braces’, her forthcoming second EP. The project steps away from the Y2K dance pop character of her 2024 debut, ‘Pretty Little Problem’, and moves deeper into dancehall and funky house. It also serves as her personal declaration of the “gyal dem” lifestyle. In iKeda’s eyes, the meaning of being a “gyal” is not limited by gender or sexuality: “It’s all about one goal, moving toward complete liberation. It’s about maximising disruption, taking up space regardless of if someone has a problem with it.”
That fearless attitude has helped her explore sounds she previously felt nervous about approaching. “Jamaicans can be very perfectionistic about their dancehall, so I’ve always been a little bit intimidated,” she admits before explaining how the music honours her Windrush heritage. “I’ve always wanted to make this kind of music, and I’m finally at the place where I’m confident in exploring that.”
The result is a sound iKeda has named “bubblegum riddim”, blending electronic club pop with dancehall rhythms. “I feel an obsession with music that’s very effervescent and bubbly – it’s like your head is fizzing.” Beneath that sugary surface, however, lies something much rougher. “A lot of pop music is meant to sound quite tuned,” she says. “But with bubblegum riddim, there’s an edge. I love how in a lot of ’90s dancehall, the female vocals are a little off-key, almost fighting the beat.”
“I want to put on an actual production. I want to make bodies of work with coherent eras”
Across ‘Bangs N Braces’, this refreshed creative perspective moves between the grime coloured intensity of ‘Red Red’ and the bright dancehall energy of ‘Go!’ and ‘Meoww’. ‘Tiger Tiger’ captures both iKeda’s vivid imagination and growing confidence. “I was going down memory lane with old childhood books, and I saw The Tiger Who Came To Tea. The story morphed into this whole thing, like there’s this secret club and you can only go if you’re a bad girl.” Alongside surreal visions of mysterious potions and twisting white rabbits, the song reflects a broader personal transformation: “It’s part of my new path of just completely feeling myself.”
With the EP arriving later this month, iKeda says her newfound confidence has brought a welcome sense of freedom that is now influencing how she writes. “I just want to make feel-good music because that’s how I’m feeling right now,” she says. Even though her songs capture the carefree thrill of club pop, she treats simple melodies with genuine seriousness. “People don’t understand how hard it is to write a catchy hook without it turning into slop,” she explains. Her perfectionist nature keeps her focused on every small element, including “the little intros and interludes, which labels don’t care about but that listeners love”.
Although she is not ready to describe herself as a pop star, her ambitions suggest she already possesses the imagination and determination required to become one. “I just want to improve everything. I want to put on an actual production. I want to make bodies of work with coherent eras,” she says when asked about her future, revealing the constant drive behind her creativity. “Right now I’m trusting more in my ideas. I’m eternally grateful for all of the good times I’ve had, but I definitely have more to say.”
iKeda’s ‘Bangs N Braces’ EP arrives August 28 through Orbit Artist Group.
