Why Black Pumas' new album 'Chronicles of a Diamond' is an obvious Grammy contender

“Chronicles of a Diamond” by Black Pumas will go down in history as one of the defining soul albums of our generation. This is not hyperbole or hometown bias. The album is an obvious Grammy contender for the Austin group who picked up seven nominations for their 2019 self-titled debut (and the deluxe re-release). But beyond that, the 10-track collection contains timeless gems that feel destined to adorn the fabric of American life for years to come.

Opening with “More Than a Love Song,” a swooning ode to life’s simple pleasures, “Chronicles” takes the listener on a journey. We move through sunny afternoons with someone you love to dark nights spent stretching toward hope and back into the sun again. “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” the epic Summer of Love jam session, wraps the album with a sweet chariot to carry you home.

This music lifts you up, then breaks you down to take you higher. It is music to bolster the spirit. This is music that will move millions. Songs that will help people, songs that will heal people.

Eric Burton — who sings “I want to win, badly as you want to breathe,” with the urgency of Odysseus stranded at sea, Ali staring down Frazier and Sha'Carri Richardson at the starting blocks on the album’s wrenching title track — does not blink when I say this.

It’s early October, a few weeks before the album release. We’re on South Congress not far from C-Boy’s Heart & Soul, the musician hangout where a little over five years ago, the former street musician took the stage with the fervor of a preacher. Standing alongside Austin music heavy Adrian Quesada, he sang rock songs that shook everyone’s soul so hard that a four-night residency in 2018 turned into a whirlwind trip around the world that continued until the group abruptly pulled the plug on a European tour last summer.

From the archives: Black Pumas: 'Let's come together with all we have'

Burton nods. It’s a given that we’re talking about a masterwork. He tries to make music that feels classic, songs he can listen to over and over, he explains.

“I'm making every album as if it’s my last,” he says.

From ‘busking on the streets to playing the Grammys’

The title “Chronicles of a Diamond” is a metaphor that evokes unmissable meaning. After years of intense pressure, something beautiful is born.

The album was a back burner project for the band for several years before shifting into hard production mode, “full speed ahead of firing on all cylinders,” at the beginning of this year, Adrian Quesada says.

When we meet at his East Austin studio a day after I talk to Burton, Quesada says the work coming to fruition seems “surreal.” Every time a song is released, “I wake up super excited. And then I get nervous and scared. And then I'm like, giddy,” he says. (The album’s lead single “More Than a Love Song” hit the top of Billboard’s Adult Alternative Airplay chart in late September.)

While Quesada felt pressure to outdo the band’s star-making debut on their sophomore effort, a greater burden fell upon Burton.

“He's the one that wrote words that literally resonated around the world on the first (album),” Quesada says. With its pastoral message of unity, the Pumas single “Colors” was a hit that touched audiences around the world. “We've heard 60,000 people sing it in Brazil, we've heard people sing it in Germany,” Quesada says.

Watch: Grammy-nominated Black Pumas perform on Congress Avenue for surprised onlookers

Rising from “busking on the streets to playing the Grammys” did cause “quite a bit of pressure,” Burton says. But he knows he earned his position righteously. “I'm supposed to be where I'm at. I deserve to be where I'm at … I've done the work to be where I'm at,” he says.

The real pressure he felt was internal. He wanted to live up to his own beliefs about the power of his creativity. “I come from playing music in church. I come from believing in things, to me, that are much greater than the Grammys,” he says.

Of the 10 tracks on the new album, Burton has sole writer’s credit on seven. He also worked alongside Quesada as a co-producer on the album.

“I had to grow. I had to become a conduit of music outside of just singing and writing the lyrics and melody, just writing the story. I had to figure out how to communicate to people who have done it for so long,” he says.

And then there was the chatter. The decision to scrap the European tour set the rumor mill on fire. People speculated openly about whether the band was breaking up in ways that were “really distracting.”

“It made it pretty hard,” Burton says.

The wheels felt ‘like they were going to come off’

Both Burton and Quesada say they never stopped working on the follow up to “Black Pumas,” but the tour break was necessary. The rush from South Congress to international stardom was both exhilarating and grueling.

“The wheels were just sometimes feeling like they were going to come off. We had been hitting it so hard for years, like, nonstop. And it was just all off one album,” Quesada says. “It just seemed like, every time there was about to be a break, there wasn't. And it was just like more and more and more touring. And we just hit a point where it was like, we need to pause if we're going to keep this thing going and not burn out.”

The touring took over their world. And while they managed to pop into a studio occasionally it “just never seemed like we were going to be able to make another album,” he says.

Burton, who hadn’t seen his mom in “ages,” felt an intense need to reconnect with his family.

“I moved to Austin, Texas, on my own,” he says. “Like I came here busking with a couple of friends who immediately left a couple of weeks after. I decided to stay.”

The months after he left the tour were about “spending holidays (with family), celebrating birthdays, finally getting my mom that house,” he says.

“Eric and I were always in communication,” Quesada says. But when they halted the tour “we just really needed to go back into our own worlds. And I think we all went and found comfort and whatever we could, family wise, but kind of never stopped thinking about the album.”

Still the public scrutiny around the tour cancellation was intense.

“It affected me for sure,” Quesada says. The day they announced the cancellation he wanted to see a band from Colombia that was playing Antone’s. “My phone was blowing up. And I was like, ‘If I go out, I'm going have an anxiety attack with so many people that are asking about it.’”

'Angel' is a light beam ‘being shot out of the darkness’

According to Burton there are no sad songs on the album, but some listeners of the aching ballad “Angel” might question that characterization.

Burton wrote the song around a decade ago when he left school to care for his ailing mother. He was still finding himself and struggling with “growing pains, like ‘Oh my goodness, I’ve got responsibilities. I don't really know who I am yet. Like, am I an artist? Should I go get a job?’” he says.

He needed to hear “the voice of an angel," he says. He was looking for guidance and he wrote the song “kind of emotionally and spiritually beckoning to my most high self.”

He thinks of it as “a light beam kind of being shot out of the darkness.”

Perhaps he was hurting when he wrote it, but “it is a song of triumph. It's a song of resilience and purpose. It's a reminder of how great I am for what I am a reflection of. And that’s in all of us,” he says.

“I feel like there's a way sometimes where Eric expresses sadness with joy and makes something super sad, super uplifting. And almost vice versa,” Quesada says. “You know, there's days where he's singing about something (happy) and there's some pain in there.”

This is part of Burton’s magic. Beyond being an incredible songwriter, “I think as far as interpreting music and bringing things to life (he’s) an incredible performer and singer,” Quesada says.

Back when Burton was busking, Tracey Chapman’s “Fast Car” was part of his repertoire. So when the band needed fresh songs for encores on an early tour Quesada suggested he dust it off. The band hadn’t had time to learn the song, so Burton took the stage solo.

“When he got off stage. We were all just, like totally in tears,” Quesada says. (The band included a cover of the song on the deluxe edition of their debut album. Austin360 captured a video of Burton playing the song at the band’s first post-pandemic lockdown show at Stubb’s in May of 2021.)

‘The way that I've evolved has just been astronomical’

The first Pumas album is built entirely of live takes. At the time, Quesada was very “precious” about the idea that the sound should be “live band playing.” For the second chapter, “we didn't want it to be like that same formula,” he says. “I manipulated the hell out of stuff. Like programmed drums, looped stuff, took stuff out, put stuff in, wasn't as precious and used the studio more as like another instrument.”

On “Chronicles of a Diamond,” a song that Burton originally wrote on piano, Quesada manually looped a track of the band playing and programmed drums to create grimy hip-hop atmospherics. The band experimented with many enhancements for “Angel” — “we had this whole choral vocal arrangement, literally done,” Quesada says — then scrapped most of them to allow the raw power of Burton’s voice and acoustic guitar to drive the song.

“Being in this band has really shaped the way that I use my strengths,” Burton says.

The Pumas crew has helped him elevate the way he emotes, how he expresses himself. In school, Burton was never a straight A student, but when awards were handed out, he was always most improved. “It happened multiple times,” he says with a laugh.

“I think the way that I've evolved has just been astronomical,” he says. “And that's pointedly because of the disposition that Adrian takes towards creating his version of the music that moves him. That is pointedly influenced by the way that my band brings their knowledge to the table and their passions to the table.”

Watch: Black Pumas’ plays an electrifying ’ACL’ version of ’Eleanor Rigby’

Of the hundreds of shows the Pumas have played around the world, that first night at C-Boys is one that Quesada will never forget. He vividly remembers walking off stage at the end.

“And, like, Eric and I looked at each other and I had to sit on the stage for a while. And I was like, oh (expletive). Because our intention was like, let's play for a month,” he says.

To weather the intense pressure around the new release, Quesada often thought back to the band’s early days which were “really humble.” Despite the fact that they are both “competitive, go-getter people,” their approach was simply to “make some music we like.”

“We literally said when it's not fun anymore. We'll stop doing it. That was our little pact,” he says.

For right now, as the Pumas sell out shows around the world, including three ACL Live shows in December (the venue added a fourth show on Tuesday), the band, the music and love it receives around the world “feels like a godsend,” Burton says.

“It's beautiful. We're super thankful,” he says.

Black Pumas in Austin

Black Pumas play ACL Live Dec. 3-6. Tickets for the Dec. 3 performance go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. At press time limited tickets were available for Dec. 4 and the other two shows (with Danielle Ponder) were sold out. Black Pumas will be at Waterloo Records at 5 p.m. on Friday for a record signing.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: New Black Pumas album 'Chronicles of a Diamond' is a timeless classic