Folk-rock duo Buffalo Traffic Jam’s Frankie Cassidy and his bandmate Nathan Ross were on the road late last year, opening shows for Dylan Gossett, when Cassidy received the call that his grandmother had unexpectedly passed away. He made the decision to leave the tour for a couple of days to be with his family — a decision that would ultimately guide the concept behind the duo’s recently released debut album. “My family is all from Maryland. I flew there to be with them, and we were looking through old pictures for her funeral,” Cassidy recalls to Billboard. “It was bittersweet looking at all the pictures, and seeing her life unfold.”
That moment of selecting photos that would most clearly portray key moments in his grandmother’s life sparked the idea for the titular track of Buffalo Traffic Jam’s debut album, Pictures of You, which was released July 31 on Arista Records.
“I fell in love with this idea of how all these songs could also be a picture of our lives over the past year and how all the crazy things have been from graduating college to now touring and doing this full-time,” Cassidy says. “This album is like an audible photo catalog.”
Cassidy and Ross met while attending Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, where Ross was pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering, while Cassidy was studying architecture. Both influenced by artists such as Zach Bryan and Noah Kahan, they began collaborating on music in 2024.
“One day I was in Yellowstone National Park and ended up getting stuck in a buffalo traffic jam for a few hours, so I added it to our list [of potential band names] as a joke,” Cassidy says of the duo’s band name. “Then a year later, we started releasing music. I used to work in a kitchen in college, and we came up with Cigarettes In the Handicap Stall [as another option] …we were always laughing, too, because especially in Yellowstone, it’s not buffalo, it’s bison.”
Cassidy and Ross graduated in May 2025 and that same month signed with Arista, on the strength of songs including “Rescue Me” and “Forgot Your Roots.” They issued a 2024 self-titled EP, followed by 2025’s Take Me Home. It was the heartbreaking “Fool’s Gold,” released in September 2025, that became their breakthrough, reaching into the top 5 on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Airplay chart.
The new album builds upon that EP, and folds in a more full-bodied sound with a broader range of instruments. But the project is still infused with elements of a rustic, pared-back sound that evokes the feel of Montana’s rugged terrains, lofty mountain peaks and wide valleys.
They worked with five different producers on songs for the project, including Brian Elmquist, Ryan Hadlock, Sam Westhoff, Carrie K and Joe Becker, a producer they had previously worked with in Bozeman and who is known for his work with Sam Barber. “Me and Nate had written these songs together acoustically, but it just felt right making this album, working with different producers and it never felt like we were straying from Buffalo Traffic Jam, it felt like we were just elevating the sound the entire time,” Cassidy says.
They worked with co-writer and producer Carrie K on “Buyin’ Dirt” in Nashville. “We were talking with Carrie and got to the topic of childhood homes,” Ross says. “Me and Nate’s old, first-ever apartment, we lived in together, we talked about driving by there and seeing other people outside of it, and so we wrote it about driving by a family home and seeing another family there. Carrie’s a phenomenal drummer, and that was the first time we used real drums and had a real drummer in the room, and the album is the first time we had full session players.” Cassidy wrote the album’s “Luckiest Man Alive” last summer, capturing the whirlwind year the duo has had. Since then, they’ve only added to their musical résumé, recently performing sold-out shows at the Troubadour, playing at Bonnaroo, and shows in Germany, Ireland and the U.K. “At the time, everything was just really crazy — it felt just way too much out of the gate, and life was weird,” Cassidy says. “But at the same time, you know you’re the luckiest man alive to be doing this right after college and pursuing your dreams.” “That’s the biggest lifestyle change I’ve ever experienced,” Ross adds. “From living in Bozeman for the past four years — and now we pretty much aren’t in Bozeman, ever.” They took the song to Nashville and finished writing and recording it with Elmquist. “He’s an extravagant producer. He’s got this homey little recording space in Nashville. It doesn’t feel like the big Nashville studios, which sometimes I feel a little overwhelmed in,” Cassidy says. “He’s just running around the room, grabbing things… one of the drums in that song is literally just his leather sandal smacking the floor, and we thought it was cool and it made the final cut, he just modified it a little in Logic.”
Ross and Cassidy wrote much of Pictures of You while on the road the past year — a time span that has seen the duo evolve on the road as well as in the studio. When they were doing some of those early shows opening for Gossett, the duo says they had no tour manager at the time, and they jumped into learning the ropes of touring themselves. “We learned a lot from our own experiences. We used my personal truck and ended up buying a little trailer. It was just me and Nate driving eight hours to the next show and staying at hotels. We wrote more together than we ever had… it’s a little easier now that we have a whole crew, and we filled out the band and all travel on a bandwagon,” Cassidy says.
“We split the tasks [of routing and booking accommodations] a bit for that,” Ross recalls of the band’s road-dog early days. “There was one time Frank booked the hotel, and we showed up at a hotel in, like, Idaho at 4:00 a.m. on Oct. 6 or something, and Frankie had booked the hotel for some time in November. I had a couple of bad hotels I booked, too. There was one where we got there and the sheets were wet in the hotel. It was disgusting.”
Now with road support and a band with them, they launched their first headlining tour earlier this year, playing up to 600-cap rooms (“We didn’t want to skip any steps,” Cassidy says). They engineered their setlist to leave room for experimentation and fine-tuning the new album. “We always kept this one slot open in our set list every night, and if we wrote something that week and we felt comfortable with it, we’d try it out,” Ross says. “Then, it was a two-sided coin, because we wrote all of these songs with a mandolin and guitar. Some songs you kind of wanted to keep that feel of just the guitar and mandolin, and maybe just add a piano in there and really keep it simple. But other times — there’s a song called ‘Graves’ on this record, we had written with just guitar and mandolin. In our mind it was a folk song, and we took that to Joe [Becker] here in Montana and turned it into a kind of indie rock song that we all love. So, it’s just experimenting with that sound and how simple or extravagant you want to go with it.”
They have a stacked lineup of shows through next year, including two sold-out shows at NYC’s Irving Plaza, stops at Atlanta’s Buckhead Theatre and Chicago’s House of Blues, as well as overseas shows in Australia and Europe. Though their tour schedule is increasingly taking them far from Bozeman, they take pride in representing some of the tight-knit musical community that is growing in the area.
“There’s just some cool music coming out of Bozeman. Sam [Barber]’s here, too,” Cassidy says. “I was writing with him about a month and a half ago. It’s just so small and connected, and Joe Becker’s working with him. There’s like one music store in Bozeman; it’s like a community hub. You go in there and buy mic stands and you’re going to be there an hour just talking to them about how tour has been.”
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