“There wasn’t really a plan, it just kind of happened…”
As life 180s go, things have worked out brilliantly for Buffalo Traffic Jam’s Frankie Cassidy and Nathan Ross.
Right about now, the 2025 graduates in architecture (Cassidy) and mechanical engineering (Ross) should be climbing the first rungs on the corporate ladder.
Instead, the best friends who first met during an epic night of Mario Kart at Montana State University, became roommates, devoured other people’s songs in between hitting the books, and then started writing and recording their own, have made one of the best debut albums of the year – and sold out two April 2027 shows at Dublin’s National Stadium before its release.
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“We didn’t play our first gig together until 2024 at a local Montana venue called The Filling Station,” smiles Cassidy as he bashfully tries to get his head around the past two years. “That was our first time we ever played live.”
“We didn’t feel any pressure to follow any path or anything,” the quieter Ross continues. “I don’t know if I had any expectations about anything, because I just had no clue!”
But there’s a beauty when you don’t know what you don’t know, and Cassidy and Ross have channelled that wide-eyed energy of chancing upon songs together and figuring it out as you go along into an album that flows beautifully and belies their early twenties years. If there’s a collection made for wide-open spaces and long drives, it’s the honed-on-the-road Americana of Pictures of You.
Nathan Ross (left) – “I think Montana played a big role in the feel of our music, for sure. There’s a lot of room for us to just kind of do whatever we want out there”
“We really thought intentionally about the order of the tracks, to tell a story,” explains Cassidy.
“We started recording the album in around November of 2025. We recorded most of this album with a really good friend of ours and collaborator. His name is Joe Becker, who also is in Bozeman, Montana. He’s become one of our best friends and one of our main points of contact with music. We actually recorded most of the album in January with him before we went out on the Take Me Home tour.
“We wanted to go out on the road and be sitting on all this music and have the time in the band to really fine-tune all these mixes and everything. January was a very busy month and definitely pulling hair out of our heads trying to get this album right, but I think it’s one of my favourite months that I’ve ever lived in, this really cool moment to be a part of.”
“Each song follows the same path on this album – they’re all about similar things – but they all have such a different sonic feel to them and they follow so many different genres,” says Ross. “I think Montana played a big role in the feel of our music, for sure. There’s a lot of room for us to just kind of do whatever we want out there.”
Pictures of You is out now on Arista
Their friendship, they both agree, has been strengthened from learning on the job.
“Me and Nate are both kind of introverted people,” admits Cassidy.
“And now becoming touring musicians full-time, we kind of thought we could go… We’ve seen a million shows in our lifetime and we thought as long as you have good music, you could kind of go out there and just play and the crowd’s going to love it. But a big learning curve has been how to really read a crowd and how to get them to sing, even if it’s a Monday night. You have to learn how to, I don’t want to say command the crowd, but get them really involved. That’s been a huge learning curve that I think we’ve been slowly getting better at.”
“Over the last few months, we’ve chipped away really slowly, trying new things each night,” shares Ross. “We spent the last year entirely together. There was maybe a stretch of four days [where we weren’t].”
As anyone who saw their sold-out debut at Dublin’s Button Factory in June will attest, all the miles and motels have paid off for the duo. And while the rest of 2026 and all of 2027 promise many highlights, they are both itching to get back here.
“I would say hands down the best crowd we’ve ever played,” says Cassidy, plámás-free.
Frankie Cassidy (right) – “We’re just making sure the music can be heard all around the world”
“We had a song called Bones, which was on our self-titled first-ever EP that we had made as a joke for friends and family. We played that song and I had recorded that one solo in… I think that may have been 2023, honestly, and just finally saw the light of day a year later. They sang every single word. It was super special.
“You would’ve thought it was our Fourth of July back in America. It was a Sunday night! I remember asking our manager – Nate also – ‘Is tomorrow a holiday?’ He was like, ‘It’s a normal Monday!’ It just felt like no one had work tomorrow. The fact that they sang every single song… It was such a special crowd. I would probably say it was my favourite day of my life.”
“It was crazy,” concludes Ross. “I couldn’t believe it. As soon as we stepped out there, they just lit up.”
Wait until they see how bright it will be on the South Circular Road next April…
Pictures of You is out now on Arista. Buffalo Traffic Jam play the National Stadium, Dublin, on 16 and 17 April, 2027.