Daisy Hamel-Buffa tells me that she doesn't know how to define her band's sound. She defers to her bandmate, Alex Kasvikis, who's called it "loud jazz," but has more recently been describing it as R&B-punk. "I will go off on a tangent and somehow say every musical genre at some point," Daisy says. Whatever it is, it's one that could be more easily explained through a feeling than genre categorization.
Daisy, Alex, Maxx Morando, Matt Filbey and Ben Roswell Salk have been making music together as DAISY for four years. The Los Angeles group's newest single, "Day Off," [...] is full of playful piano and instrumentation, built around lead vocalist Daisy's soulful voice. It's a summertime bop-and-a-half that I imagine sounds best blasted through the car stereo.
The Internet's Matt Martians actually provided the beat, and Daisy wrote the song about "this very big crush I had on this boy that works at the Trader Joe's down my street and having this unsolicited crush on this guy and does he even know that I exist, and does he notice that I'm obsessed with him," she explains. (Daisy was also on Steve Lacy's Apollo XXI as the sole feature.) But if the song is about the stressful, obsessive yearning that comes with crushes, it doesn't seem that way. The Seannie Bryan-directed video is a sunny, heart-warming delight, filled with cameos of friends, hugs, dancing, and displays of mutual support. [The Fader, May 2019]
