Durand Jones & The Indications live at Edgefield on Sept. 28, 2021—click to see more photos by Blake SourisseauDurand Jones is the yeller—a soulful, boisterous voice full of pure passion that oozes crackling emotion à la forefathers James Brown and Charles Bradley—meanwhile Aaron Frazer’s feather-light falsetto makes him the quiet, smooth, delicate one.
This is a trope that Frazer would like to push back on, and the evidence to support his argument is heard on his band’s fourth studio record, “Flowers,” released in June. The two singers have complemented each other by sharing vocal duties on Durand Jones & The Indications’ albums over the years, and with this latest album of breezy, classic soul songs, Frazer is quick to hail Jones’ development.
“His vocal technique has evolved in such an amazing way to where he can get really intimate,” he describes. “Durand’s voice is extremely sensitive and extremely versatile, and can have that smoothness.”
Frazer also knows that “Durand loves singing loud,” and he says it’s so fun to hear him go full send: “open shoulders, [open] diaphragm, just resonant in the soft palate.”
For Jones, his contributions to “Flowers” represent more of his true self than he’s shown before with The Indications. Prior to rejoining founding members Frazer and Blake Rhein at the latter’s Chicago home to begin writing new music, Jones spent a year and a half “laying everything out that I felt insecure about. I felt insecure about my sexuality, growing up poor; about a myriad of things. I laid all of that out on the table, and it made me such a stronger person, to the point that I got back to The Indications and I was way more sure of myself.”
The core trio of Aaron Frazer, Blake Rhein and Durand Jones with the painting of calla lilies—which are full of “symbolism around growth and rebirth,” according to Rhein—that appears on the cover “Flowers”: Photo by Kalie JohnstonThe stretch of time between records was the longest break the band had ever taken. Both Jones and Frazer released solo records, with Jones sharing his debut, “Wait Til I Get Over,” in 2023 and Frazer offering his sophomore effort, “Into The Blue,” in 2024.
“Flowers” is a sonic departure from the disco-funk of 2021’s poppy “Private Space” yet contains all the hallmark rich vocal harmonies, honeyed R&B instrumentation and emotional heat that the group is known for—albeit at an unhurried, languid clip that exudes poise in the sound. Self-produced and -recorded by the band, Steve Okonski provides keys and Michael Montgomery’s on bass while Rhein primarily plays guitar and Frazer’s behind the kit, per usual.
Formed in a basement in Bloomington, Ind., in 2012, Durand Jones & The Indications were more or less a one-off side project of Frazer and Rhein’s blues rock band, Charlie Patton’s War, featuring Jones on vocals. The band had “a pretty finite goal in the beginning,” Rhein says: Make a record.
Bonding over a love of old soul 45s, the group was supposed to simply be a recording project. “We were really obsessed with obscurity at the time. So we thought: What better way to honor the obscure 45s in our collection than to become one?” Frazer laughs.
Laying down tracks during those first two years, the group ultimately released its self-titled debut on Ohio’s Colemine Records in 2016, playing just two local shows during this time. “It felt really unrealistic, in a lot of ways, to make a band a career,” Rhein remembers, “and so it didn’t even really cross our minds when we were working on the first record.” Thinking that was it, the members moved on to other things in life.
“My focus on this album cycle was trying to make sure that my collaborators were having a great time, were feeling heard and happy, and that our relationship as collaborators was strong and balanced,” Frazer says (right): Photo by Kalie JohnstonIn 2018, hometown label Dead Oceans reissued the group’s debut plus signed Durand Jones & The Indications to make two more records. It was a watershed moment for the band that almost never was: “Alright, we’re on the hook now. We have to make this work. We literally signed the paper,” Frazer recalls.
The core trio has fulfilled that contractual obligation and then some. “I’ve realized how difficult it is to stick together as a band for four records, and to do that all while self-producing is really challenging,” Rhein says. “I’m really proud of the collaborative aspect of the band and how we’ve been able to self-produce things together.”
Many of the tracks on “Flowers” are based on one-take demos and feature raw elements from early sessions in Rhein’s apartment. As a group, they’re all still very much on a journey of self-discovery to “figure out who we are as a band,” Frazer says, “but I think one of the things we learned was this wisdom to just give yourself permission to use the thing that has the magic”—and not feel like everything has to be so polished.
“Giving yourself permission to do that was so freeing,” Rhein adds. “Flowers” allowed them to “be able to revisit original processes we came up with making the first record,” creating an unrefined fluidity that removed self-consciousness. It all goes hand in hand with feeling a bit more grown-up and experienced.
“Flowers are a sign of maturity, growth, spring, productivity,” Jones says, and “these songs touch on such mature topics, things that we never got to sing about before.”
Yes, there’s plenty of love songs—Durand Jones & The Indications’ bread and butter—but there’s also immense heartbreak for a car (“Rust and Steel”), Barry White energy on standout single “Really Wanna Be With You” and stories of lives well lived (“Been So Long”—watch below), with Rhein noting that “this record was the most collaborative we’ve been in the lyric sense.”
For Frazer, he, of course, concentrated on the quality of his songcraft, performance and production. “But more than that, my focus on this album cycle was trying to make sure that my collaborators were having a great time, were feeling heard and happy, and that our relationship as collaborators was strong and balanced.”
His thoughts were on his band members and their emotional health, “and not necessarily what the end result of the music was gonna be. Let the end result of the music be this organic outgrowth of this healthy collaboration. And you know, that tied back to this idea of flowers—this natural, organic outgrowth.”
The record’s sound is just that—intentionally unintentional. Rather than looking outward and trying to “synthesize our influences,” as Frazer puts it, they looked at their own discography and asked, “What were some of our favorite experiments?” At this point in their career, “You can reference yourself. We had enough of a body of work that we could look at our own music [and] take what we felt like were our favorite parts of it.”
Released on June 27, 2025, “Flowers” was self-produced and -recorded by the band—listen to the entire record below.“Getting together did feel like a little bit of a fresh start,” Rhein says. The white calla lilies on the album’s cover represent this “symbolism around growth and rebirth.”
“When you develop a body of work that’s big enough, a picture can emerge of what you actually sound like,” Frazer continues.
“We had this mutual understanding of what [an] Indications [song] sounds like,” Rhein describes, and the album closer—full of sultry regret—“Without You” was an early signpost for that sound.
Buoyed by a confidence, maturity, insight and cohesivity that comes from within, “With this album, it was like: ‘This sounds like Durand Jones & The Indications.’” Frazer tells. “I think that can only come from taking a pause… to actually look at your own work and glean the lessons from that.”
