Vancouver’s socially conscious Buddie on evolving its sound beyond “grunge pop”
Performing at the Eastside Arts Festival, the indie-rock band says it has no intention of being pegged as strictly a ’90s throwback
Buddie
As part of a free afternoon of music presented by the Eastside Arts Society and the Rickshaw Theatre, Buddie performs at MacLean Park on July 25 at 7:20 pm
THERE’S A CERTAIN alchemy that happens when like-minded musicians get together in a garage, basement, or rented rehearsal studio and create something as a collective. It’s a kind of magic that the members of the Vancouver indie-rock band Buddie have only recently begun to tap into.
Singer-guitarist Dan Forrest began Buddie as a vehicle for his own songwriting several years back when he was still living in Philadelphia. He moved to the West Coast of Canada in August of 2021, bringing the Buddie name with him and recruiting a crew of local musicians to play with him.
The current version of the band includes guitarist Patrick Farrugia, bassist Lindsay Partin, and drummer Natalie Glubb, all of whom have begun to make their creative voices heard.
“One of the most exciting things that’s been happening maybe the last six months or a year has been figuring out how to write more as a unit,” Forrest tells Stir in a Zoom call along with his bandmates.
“Before, with the previous stuff, it’s been Dan bringing an idea, and then kind of adding things to it,” notes Farrugia, “but I feel like now, there is a lot more collectively—like, from the ground up—making the song. I’ll bring some ideas in, and try to kind of evolve the previous sound, rather than do more of the same.”
A musical project needs to evolve its sound, of course, lest it find itself in a stagnant rut. Based on the evidence found on last November’s Glass album, mind you, Buddie already has a pretty fantastic foundation upon which to build whatever’s coming next. The record kicks off with “In the Glass Shell”, which borrows the loud-quiet-loud template of the Pixies and boasts a chorus that welds the fuzz-strafed guitars of classic grunge with an undeniable pop melody. Later on, “No Fun” invites the listener into a heat-hazed shoegaze dream.
So what is this new sound that Buddie is forging together? Forrest indicates that it’s too early to say exactly, but expect even more six-string action.
“From the start, pop sensibilities have been pretty to the fore in this project, and then everything else kind of supports that,” the frontman says. “Somewhere along the way I let some of the fun guitar stuff that brought me into being in a rock band in the first place go to sit in the back of the arrangements a little bit more. So now it’s kind of coming up to the fore. There’s some interesting riffs that are sometimes the start of the songs, especially when Pat brings something in.”
“I’d say, too,” bassist Partin adds, “the songwriting is a little bit more complex with this new batch of songs. They’re not as straightforward with the pop thing, but still keeping that pop vein underlying it.”
There are a couple of local gigs on Buddie’s calendar this summer—including the Eastside Arts Festival’s free afternoon of music at Strathcona’s MacLean Park on July 25, which will also feature sets by Wack, Big Rig, Stephen Hamm: Theremin Man, and Jody Glenham. After that, though, it’s back to the rehearsal space to hash out material for a forthcoming album. Whatever emerges from the quartet’s writing process might not fit squarely into the category of “grunge pop”, which is the way Buddie describes itself on Instagram and elsewhere.
“I think it’s pretty apt,” Glubb argues. “I mean, we’re all very influenced by grunge.” If there’s a downside to using “grunge pop” as shorthand for what Buddie does, the drummer says, it’s that it has “a bit of a retro connotation”.
“I think that’s maybe a direction we’re heading in with the new stuff as well,” she says. “It sounds a bit more like music that’s happening at the moment, rather than a bit of a throwback pastiche.”
No young band wants to be pegged as being strictly ’90s revivalists—a phenomenon that might be called “the curse of Yuck”—although Forrest confesses to being briefly “obsessed” with Third Eye Blind’s eponymous 1997 debut LP, in particular the song “Losing a Whole Year”, which he cops to listening to “probably, like, a hundred times in a couple months’ span”.
One thing that seems unlikely to change, though, is the incisive, socially conscious quality of Forrest’s lyrics. On Buddie’s 2023 album Agitator (actually recorded in 2021, when Forrest was still in Philadelphia), songs like “Class Warfare” and “Game of Global Consequence” tackle topics of wealth inequity and social struggle. Glass tracks like “Stressed in Paradise” and “In the Glass Shell” find Forrester taking an unflinching look at the discomfiting realities of modern city living. In the latter, he lays bare the emptiness of an existence in which Amazon and Doordash are the only lifelines to the outside world: “I sent for a book/And a meal/I can’t touch/But I still feel.”
Forrest says that, while he is quite deliberate about addressing topics of social justice and urban isolation in his songs, he stops short of trying to tell people what to think. “I’m just trying to share my experience and observations in a way that maybe resonates with people in a different light than they’ve experienced before, and say it in a way that resonates with people’s emotions, so that it actually hits home.
“Obviously, that’s supported by the music, and the fact that it’s catchy, and all the contributions that all of us are making to the sound. I think music is really special, in that you can say something that might connect with people on a deeper level because of the personal observational poetry combined with the emotive power of the music.” 
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