Been Stellar

Scream from New York, NY, the first album by Been Stellar, is a remarkably brutal debut –

bruised and volatile, it captures an image of ‘20s New York that’s unrelenting and harsh, where

tenderness is a finite resource burned up by the machinery of the city and human connection is

a luxury product. Leaving behind the driving shoegaze of their early recordings, the NYC-based

five-piece tap into the disaffected sound and spirit of New York luminaries like Sonic Youth and

Interpol, as well as the nihilistic, yearning cool of Iceage and Bends-era Radiohead, striking

upon a sound that’s fearsome, buffeting and beautiful at the same time – a tidal wave as viewed

from underneath.

As its wry title implies, Scream from New York, NY, is a record about what happens when

language fails – between friends, partners, a city and its citizens – and the primal scream you

might let out when words just don’t work anymore. Guitarist Skyler Knapp, vocalist Sam Slocum,

Brazilian-born guitarist Nando Dale, bass player Nico Brunstein and drummer Laila Wayans met

as undergrads at NYU, bonding over a shared sense of humor and forming a motley crew

based more on emotional compatibility than any rigid ideas of shared artistic sensibility. Finding

that last vestiges of the city’s famed 2000s and 2010s DIY underground had been ground down

to nothing, the band put on their own shows, renting spaces and collaborating with friends to

build the world they wanted to inhabit.

Determined to break new sonic ground, the band embarked on a relentless practice schedule,

even renting scrappy studios on days off during tours with Fontaines DC and Shame. After

befriending him at SXSW, the band tapped producer Dan Carey (black midi, Wet Leg) to help

coalesce the disparate elements of their sound that had been percolating: forceful, driving

physicality; pop classicism; gnarled beauty; and a rich emotional core. The resulting 10-song

album announces Been Stellar as gimlet-eyed chroniclers of contemporary youth, staring

through noise and confusion into the dark heart of modern life. These songs embody the spirit of

a city that makes and breaks its inhabitants on a daily basis – an irony befitting the album’s tone:

Been Stellar’s preternatural ability to capture the disconnection that haunts New York with

photorealist detail might just be the thing that vaults them into its pantheon.