There’s a particular kind of patience running through everything Bondo makes, and the video for “Zuma” is no exception. The Los Angeles quartet has spent most of the last five years working in the same unhurried register: guitars that lean more toward mood than riff, vocals set low in the mix, rhythm sections that hold a room together without asking for attention.
The band, made up of Niko Escudero and Brian Bartus on guitar and vocals, Andrew “Gerry” Dykes on bass, and Cook Lee-Chobanian on drums, built that sound across a run of releases starting with 2021’s self-produced EP 77 and continuing through 2022’s Print Selections and 2024’s Harmonica. “Zuma” comes from their next record, a self-titled album due July 24, and it arrives at a point where the band’s approach feels settled rather than searched for.
The song itself is the album’s ninth track, and it’s a quiet one. It moves slowly, built from layered guitar lines that drift rather than lead, with the drums and bass keeping just enough pulse underneath to stop it from dissolving entirely. It’s less about a hook than a mood, the kind of track that rewards a full, uninterrupted listen over a scan for a chorus. The video matches that pacing, favoring space and stillness over cuts, which suits a band that has never been in a hurry to make its point.
The album was recorded and mixed in 2025 by JooJoo Ashworth at Studio 22 in Los Angeles and mastered by Mikey Young, with the same core team that’s shaped Bondo’s records since Harmonica. It’s also the band’s first release for Solid Brass Records, a Los Angeles label built around reissuing 90s DIY-era music and backing newer bands working in that same lineage, a roster the band’s downbeat, unhurried post-rock fits comfortably alongside.
With the self-titled record two weeks out, “Zuma” gives a clear sense of where Bondo is headed on it: further into the quiet, and further from anything resembling a rush.
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