Been Stellar On Their Debut Album, ‘Scream From New York, NY,’
How does one take a city - with all of its sound, its heat, its imposition, and its temper - and make it into music?
New York City has a long and beloved history of musical representation. It is a city that loves to be captured through the waffled metallic coiling of microphones, whether it be through that of Reed, Moore, Sinatra, Casablancas, or Harry. The city is indifferent to its retrieval, and its decades and street corners are only known to be possessed in retrospect, long after the fact, its musical decades reflected on and defined by desperately categorical writers like me spouting obvious and convenient assertions like, ‘Lou Reed was New York in the 60’s’ as distant and easy as an assertion could possibly be given the time allotted to see it.
It is rare and difficult for an artist to willfully and capably encapsulate a time, a space, and a feeling in New York at the time in which it is taking place, being lived, and being felt. Scream From New York, NY, the debut album from New York City’s Been Stellar, is an album that succeeds - consciously or not - at holding the city’s depth in the palm of its hand.
Following the release of their 2022 self-titled EP through So Young Records, Been Stellar have toured North America and Europe extensively, fostering a devoted fanbase among youthful punters and BBC Dads alike, and most notably, among fellow artists. In this profession, you encounter a lot of artists, and most of the time, artist mostly want to talk about other artists, and when I say that I live in Brooklyn, Been Stellar is the band that artists want to talk about.
Now, the release of their much-anticipated debut album, Scream From New York, NY, (through Dirty Hit), builds upon the foundations that they’ve laid and is the upright culmination of nearly a decade of genuine and unmistakable hard work. They are a band deeply observant and devoted to their craft, and it can be heard. They have been able to apply the noise - the literal screams that boom at you from the night, eavesdropped cafe arguments, and the violent abruptness of a slowing train car - of their lives to each composition, as well as translate the visceral experience of this time in the city in a way that is both mysteriously cathartic and anxiously resilient. Their music sounds like these years in America’s largest city; like walking fast down Avenue A, like closing down the bar, like sitting on the roof at your friend’s place looking West, like a puddle of blood on the subway platform, like a winter breeze freezing your hands, like sharing a flask on the L, like being hurt, like healing.
It is a long-awaited album from a long-beloved band that is well worth your time, and as it happens, ours, so we met them - Sam Slocum, Skyler Knapp, Nico Brunstein, Laila Wayans, and Nando Dale - at their apartment in Brooklyn just a day after their American festival debut at Shaky Knees and in that awkward period just before their album release, when all they could do is sit together with their creation, get to know it, and tell me about it.
How’s it going? How was Shaky Knees?
Skyler: It was good! It was our first American festival so it was a little disorienting, especially because it was a very rock-heavy festival. All the other festivals we’ve done in the past have been in the UK and with a wider range of music, so there was a lot of, ‘fuckin’ jump!’
Laila: That might just be American festivals, honestly.
Skyler: Yeah, probably. We had a good month off so it was good to get back into the groove of things.
Nando: There was one artist bar, so all of the artists gathered there and it was funny to be in that environment with all of these different bands. Metal bands, groovy bands-
Sam: There was a guy there named Platinum Nick who had that printed on the back of his jacket and I kept seeing him around so I was like, ‘ah, alright I gotta ask this guy what’s going on.’
How do you feel about the album now that it’s out, especially thinking about the original idea versus the end product?
Skyler: It was definitely an ambitious idea, making an album at all, but also the idea behind the album. We were trying to capture quite a big thing. I think that the biggest thing we learned early on was to not think too hard about what the ‘concept’ of the album was going to be, because the concept is dependent on us being as sincere as possible and letting things happen naturally, rather than trying to purposefully be like, ‘ok we are going to make an album about New York,’ so that was a big point like half way through, that we need to stop trying so hard and just detach our brains from it and let the ideas come out of us.
I think that when we were writing, we had gotten into the weeds with the dynamic of songs and the order of them on the record, but once we started working with Dan, the whole concept came back into focus because he got really obsessed with the original idea - screams and sounds and city noises. We got to see it again freshly through his eyes, and the finished product sounds way more like the original idea than we thought it would, and I think a lot of that was from working with Dan.
“I feel like the melodies are really fighting with this machine that’s underneath it, like trying to find the beauty in the cracks between with these buses going by.”
Nando: It’s interesting because we’ve never done an album like this before, we’ve been able to spend so much time with the music before putting it out, as the songs are coming out and we are doing these interviews, we are making sense of the record and learning about it day by day. It actually came out way closer to the idea than we thought it would. At least for me, I understand the record more now.
Can you discuss in more detail the role that New York plays as a theme on this record as well as how that theme is applied practically in the songs? Bring it out of the abstract a little.
Skyler: This quote that I was really obsessed with from an old Sonic Youth interview from the 80’s- Thurston was saying in response to the whole punk movement at the time, how people saw that as the New York sound, but he found that to be very inaccurate because those songs were these polished, short, three-minute ‘pop’ songs, whereas he was coming from the whole No Wave thing, which was this whole big explosion of sounds. I mean, we definitely make pop, but the ethos of that idea, where you can’t be selling a cookie-cutter idea of New York, you need to let the city itself be a component of the songwriting process and take all of it into account.
As far as how the specific mechanics of that came into the songwriting, there are a lot of big highs and low lows, especially on the second half of the album, they really wind and twist, and to me that mirrors the intense feelings that you have living here, where emotions shift very quickly. You see someone do something or say something and it changes the direction of your day. The city imposes itself on you. I think that that’s something that consciously or unconsciously filtered into the music.
“At the end of the day, the biggest pressure came from proving to ourselves that we are a real band; that we are people who can make a real body of work; a contribution to the canon of New York music. ”
When we were recording, Dan had Laila’s kick drum side-chained to this kind of insane pedalboard on a table, and when we were recording he had it pumped into our headphones, and when you were playing something, there was this sort of aura or reflection imposing itself on you. On the record, it comes in and out at certain points. I think that that was exactly the sort of physical manifestation of that idea.
Nando: Dan also had us go around and record samples from the city. Construction, or chatter in the park, whatever. It was meant to be more prominent in the record, but in the quieter moments, you can still hear this chatter in the background. I went to Coney Island and tried to record rides and literal screams from the rollercoasters. You will hear some random conversations on the record and different city sounds.
Laila: To me, one of the best reflections of the city in a song is Start Again. To me, that’s what New York sounds and feels like. Somewhat chaotic, and when you first hear it, you can’t hear all of the layers, but the more you listen to it, the more you hear from it. When you step out on a street corner, there are so many things happening, people riding a bike and a bus going by and someone yelling. That song reminds me of standing on a street corner. In the drums, I don’t think I did this on purpose, but the drums are very much on a loop and kind of repetitive and really move along. Living in New York, things move so fast, time moves so fast, and I think that came through with my drums on the record.
Skyler: Laila’s drumming was a massive influence for me on this record because it sounds very machine-like. It sounds like a lot of processes. I feel like the melodies are really fighting with this machine that’s underneath it, trying to find the beauty in the cracks inbetween, with these buses going by and all that.
What is the thing that separates this album from the EP the most, and how has your methodology of songwriting changed between the two projects?
Sam: The EP wasn’t written with any focus in mind, or even an EP in mind. Those were just the best songs we had at the time. So Young approached us to put out an EP and they kind of had to convince us to do that because we wanted to do an album. That was just cherry picking the best songs of the time. With these songs, there was a looming idea over the album and the writing process.
A big difference was pressure, I think. There’s a lot more pressure in these songs. Pressure can be really scary, you wonder about the effect that it’ll have on the product, whether it’ll make it better or worse. I think that the pressure made this product better, especially because we’re covering a topic like New York, a place so dense and populated and chaotic. Pressure is a natural element to that environment. If we tried to write an album about living on a farm or something from here, pressure isn’t what we’d want. Because of the topic, pressure was a really positive thing for us. It forced us to buckle down. We had a deadline and it forced us to follow that.
Skyler: It was really intense. Pressure from ourselves, but it’s also a weird spot to be writing an album because, you know, that old adage that’s like, ‘you have your whole life to write your first album-’, but that was our EP. We were used to no one really giving a shit about us and all of a sudden people started caring about us. There were a million different forces on us. At the end of the day, the biggest pressure came from proving to ourselves that we are a real band; that we are people who can make a real body of work; a contribution to the canon of New York music.
Do you think that you’ve achieved what you set out to?
Skyler: I can now look at us and think that yes, we can do this. Making this album proved to me that we can do it. I don’t think I’d ever want to feel like, ‘yeah, we accomplished it,’ because that feels like a line at the end of a story, and I don’t know any great artist who ever does feel that way. I’m not trying to say we’re great artists, just that we wrote the first chapter of the book, but the book isn’t written.
Laila: The album represents what we were trying to do and how we felt in that time. It feels like we wrote it a while ago and it encapsulates that time for me, and for that, I feel accomplished.
Do you think that you made this with the intention of validating yourselves or for it to be had by an audience? Does art belong to you or the people?
Laila: During the process of writing and recording, it belonged to us, but now it’s said and done and it has to be given to the people.
Skyler: For me, I was not too conscious of how these songs were going to come across to an audience when we were writing them. It was more a matter of proving it to ourselves. I think it was a battle to prove that we are a good band. I mean, I believe in us more than anybody else does, but that’s what I was thinking of more than anything.
Nico: I like the album a lot, and I hope that people will understand it the way that we do. I want people to understand the sincerity that we wrote it with. Writing it in the basement, just the five of us, we kind of put this shield up around us and wrote what we wanted to. Sky mentioned that we weren’t trying to write for an audience, but we did try to diversify the music a little bit. I guess what I want people to take away from it is to try and understand it in their own way because Sam wrote some amazing lyrics, and the music supports them really well. It tells a narrative and represents a place and a time not just for us but for a city, and we did it in the most sincere way that we could have. I hope that they understand it the way that we do.
