Aaron Frazer

The debut solo album from Aaron Frazer, drummer and falsetto singer of Durand Jones & The Indications, released January 8, 2021 on Dan Auerbach's Easy Eye Sound (with Dead Oceans handling distribution). Tracked over a single week at Easy Eye in Nashville after a fast and prolific writing run with Auerbach, Introducing... is a twelve-song suite of '70s-flavored soul that announces Frazer as a frontman in his own right after years of singing harmony from behind the kit.

Auerbach produced the whole record and surrounded Frazer with the deep-bench Easy Eye house cast — the kind of session players who routinely show up on records by Yola, Marcus King, and Dee White. The result splits the difference between protest-era Gil Scott-Heron and Sam Cooke-style devotional ballads.

Cool stuff:

• Produced by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys at his Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville — Auerbach's go-to setup for resurrecting vintage-soul fidelity using all-analog gear
• Recorded in a single week following a rapid songwriting session, with most takes captured live in the room
• Frazer is the drummer and falsetto vocalist of Durand Jones & The Indications, the Bloomington-via-Brooklyn soul band on Colemine — Introducing... was his first time stepping out as a frontman
• Lead single "If I Got It (Your Love Brought It)" found a second life on TikTok and streaming playlists, pulling Frazer into a much larger audience than soul-revival records usually reach
• The album frames itself as protest soul in the Gil Scott-Heron tradition on tracks like "Bad News" while also leaning into doo-wop devotion on the love songs

Spin it for: vintage soul fidelity, a drummer-frontman in falsetto, and Dan Auerbach's pristine analog production behind every cut.

Standouts: "If I Got It (Your Love Brought It)" · "Bad News" · "Have Mercy" · "You Don't Wanna Be My Baby"

Sources: GRAMMY.com — Dan Auerbach feature · Colemine Records · Bandcamp · Album of the Year