About — King Buffalo

KING BUFFALO – Rochester, NY.
Heavy Psychedelic Rock.
Formed in September of 2013.

BIOGRAPHY

King Buffalo is the trio of vocalist/guitarist Sean Roa, bassist Dan Reynolds, and drummer Scott Donaldson. Since forming in 2013, the self-proclaimed "heavy psych" band has made its name via 3 EPs, 6 Full-lengths, and tours with the likes of Clutch, All Them Witches, Uncle Acid & the deadbeats, The Sword and Elder.

Rochester, New York-based trio King Buffalo will issue their Seventh full-length, Doomsayer, on December 4th, as a self-release in North America and through Stickman Records in Europe. Preorders will be available on September 25th via http://kingbuffalo.bigcartel.com.

Noting that Doomsayer is the first new album from the progressive heavy psychedelic rockers since 2022 doesn’t quite tell the whole story. That year, when the three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Sean Roa, bassist Dan Reynolds and drummer Scott Donaldson released Regenerator, their sixth full-length also served as the final installment of what’s been unofficially dubbed their ‘pandemic trilogy.’ With 2021’s The Burden of Restlessness and the jammy, recorded-in-a-cave Acheron before it, Regenerator dared to look ahead to a future beyond its then-present in craft and circumstance.

It was a landmark moment, in no small part because of how the band set forth from there. Over the subsequent four years, they’ve toured hard internationally and built a reputation that stands in line with the achievements across those three records and the three before them. Doomsayer finds King Buffalo self-recording at a crossroads, reveling in the process with poise and clarity in defiance of turbulent times in songs like “The Slick and the Dead” and the closing title-track, and a defined sense of who they are that bleeds through the entirety.

They’re still reaching into the unknown sound-wise, still growing, still evolving, but where they’re coming from has changed, and the experience they’ve had on the road is relevant across the album, both in the poise of the material and the confidence of their delivery. Like the pandemic trilogy, Doomsayer was made at home, but it was made in a studio the band built themselves. Their own space. They continue to explore, and to find new ground as a result, but they do so in a place they’ve made for themselves, with a maturity they’ve earned one stage at a time. Their own sound.

“Doomsayer originated in early 2026,” says Roa, “out of many hours of jam sessions in our new studio space, playing around and seeing where it took us. We didn’t really have an end goal in mind of what we were going for. We were simply exploring ideas and seeing what ended up speaking to us the most. So much has happened, both as a band and in our personal lives since our last record, that ended up becoming the inspiration to many of the lyrics on Doomsayer. I think as a result, this is some of our most upfront, direct and riff-driven work to date. We are incredibly proud of it, and can’t wait for it to get out into the world.”

Prefaced by the 2025 standalone single “Balrog” and live releases by the dozen if you count digitally-posted bootlegs from across their 13 years together – plus a couple on vinyl as well – Doomsayer finds that which is most essential in King Buffalo’s sound and pushes it to the forefront, whether that’s Roa’s expansive tone, vocal melodies and growing role as producer/engineer, Reynolds’ warm low end groove or the character in Donaldson’s fills and flows, in songs that capture the dynamic chemistry between the three of them at its most vibrant, breathtaking and viscerally heavy. – JJ Koczan, Sept. 2026

King Buffalo will be touring in support of Doomsayer this fall and winter across North America and in Europe in March of 2027. More to be announced soon.