The one-show soul band that lowrider crews championed

The story of Durand Jones & The Indications begins at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music, where Blake Rhein and Aaron Frazer met Durand Jones, a Louisiana native doing postgraduate studies in classical saxophone. They bonded over songwriting and old soul 45s. Rhein and Frazer brought in two other members of their blues rock band, Charlie Patton's War, and wrote the first album between the fall of 2012 and 2014, recording on a Tascam four-track recorder.

They treated it so lightly that the band played what they called their one and only show in May 2014. In 2015 the Ohio soul label Colemine Records asked to release music from those sessions. A first 45 followed that year, the debut album the next, and then a single show in Bloomington in April 2016 before everyone went off to separate careers. But critics and independent record stores kept talking, and the band reunited and toured through 2017, mostly in the Midwest and the South. The album was reissued by Dead Oceans in 2018.

One of their earliest fans was the Chicano lowrider community, noted for a love of oldies, which began circulating the music as early as 2016. In tribute the band released “Cruisin' to the Park” in 2019, with a video featuring California lowriders, and in 2021 a Spanish version, “Cruisin' to the Parque”, with Y La Bamba. Their second album, American Love Call, came out in 2019 after sessions in Brooklyn where they focused on developing a vocal group sound.

Private Space followed in July 2021, and Flowers, their fourth album, in 2025. Along the way the members kept busy: Frazer released a solo album produced by Dan Auerbach, and Rhein worked as a researcher for The Numero Group, producing reissue compilations. Songs like “Is It Any Wonder?”, “Sea Gets Hotter” and “Love Will Work It Out” keep that old-record devotion at the center, a band built by people who loved soul first.