Q&A: Been Stellar Talks Dichotomous New York Scenes, Becoming Themselves and Their Cataclysmic New EP
AS ONE OF THE FIERCEST UPCOMING BANDS — in New York City, it’s typical for Been Stellar to be compared to some of New York’s most prestigious outfits: Interpol, The Strokes, etc. Despite being so moved by the city that brought them together, they reject this notation time and time again. Maybe people like the idea of having a savior in a music scene that isn’t what it used to be. In “My Honesty,” one of Been Stellar’s singles off their newest self-titled EP, lead singer Sam Slocum recites in a spoken word, “And so the kids burrow themselves / Down beneath the burned out remnants of the city they once called home… And they saw the best minds of their generation / Only in memory.” The band is less a regurgitation of 2000s rock nostalgia and more so a breath of fresh air.
The five-piece, composed of Sam Slocum, Skyler St. Marx, Nando Dale, Nico Brunstein, and Laila Wayans, released their EP Been Stellar this past Friday after wading in the music scene for over five years. They’ve spent their time in New York carving out a place for themselves amidst the endless amounts of bands that spark out of the city, with notable acts on their show flyers being Catcher and Ultra Q. Their previous songs have a noisier reputation, tracks such as “The Poets” or “Fear of Heights” gripping onto garage rock sensibilities. Now, their EP dances around large soundscapes, largely inspired by classic shoegaze projects while integrating sounds similar to their post-punk peers.
The three lead singles for Been Stellar, “Manhattan Youth,” “My Honesty,” and “Kids 1995,” are sandwiched between two unheard tracks, “Arthur” and “Ohm.” The former track pushes their instruments to their limits in out-of-body riffs and distortion, while the closer remains atmospheric and hazy while Slocum borderline whispers the lyrics out like he's in REM. New York lives in these songs through and through. This is less of a decision as it is a natural growth, an intrinsic compound that makes Been Stellar what they are. It’s just like Slocum sings on “Ohm”: “It’s easy to come by, much harder to let it go.”
Now signed to So Young Records (Lime Garden, Gently Tender), an independent record label from the minds of So Young Magazine based out of the UK, Been Stellar recently wrapped up a UK tour run, playing venues like Brixton’s The Windmill and on Latitude Festival and Truck Festival’s lineups. Post-release, Been Stellar will open for Just Mustard on their North America tour this November.
Sam, Skyler, Nando, and Nico crammed into a pub booth in Brighton to talk to Luna about tour, their new EP, and finding their sound along the way. Read Luna’s conversation with Been Stellar below.
LUNA: You’re all currently on tour in the UK. Is touring in the UK a lot different than touring in the US?
SKYLER: I mean, the UK is a lot more rewarding for a band like us in a lot of ways. There’s definitely more interest here and people are able to understand it a bit more. The US is fun, but it’s a lot of even longer drives with often not quite as much enthusiasm. I think in general, at least to me personally, it’s a very wildly different experience. It’s not comparable. The UK is more exciting but [in the] US, you get more into a groove.
SAM: There’s also the whole tourist aspect of being in the UK, which is coming from the US. The first time we toured here a couple months ago, any down time we had we were trying to see things that we’ve never seen before. In the US though, I don’t really want to tour around Omaha. No shade to Omaha, on the record.
NANDO: It does feel sometimes in the US you’re only playing shows in cities just because you have the markets that actually make sense, that actually stream your music. Most of the cities, they might be cool cities, but they might not actually be cities that are interested in our music. Sometimes it just feels like you just have to play them because you might as well, you know what I mean?
NICO: I feel like even in a small town [in the UK] like New Castle, people are still really into that kind of music. It means a ton to them to go there. Not that it doesn’t mean a ton to go to the other towns in the US, but you can definitely feel it more in the UK.
LUNA: You mentioned that people in the UK are able to understand your music better? Is that what you meant?
SKYLER: I think they just have more context for it. I think people here [in the UK] grow up listening to guitar music moreso than they do in the US. It’s somewhat of a niche if you’re into punk music or guitar music [in the US], whereas here that’s people’s bread and butter in a lot of ways. In the US you need to find the right pocket of people in every city. But here, the layman will be interested generally because that’s what they listen to here.
NANDO: Even our friends Sports Team, they were on the biggest stage at Truck Fest. It was shoulder to shoulder, everyone was moshing, it was fucking unbelievable. But in the US, their tour is like a 250 [capacity venue]. Which is great for a band that’s coming over with no context for them, but it’s a crazy dichotomy.
SKYLER: I still don’t really know where we stand in New York currently… At this point I almost feel less and less like a New York band. The past few months we’ve been doing a lot of work outside of New York. It’s going to be interesting to go back there and reintegrate ourselves. It’s kind of confusing as to what that would look like. We’ve gotten really lucky in the past few months that we’ve been able to do this, but it’s like we can’t really go back and do as many of the same shows that we would typically do before, jump on bills, so on and so forth.
LUNA: What does the scene look like in New York for you guys? What kind of things are you seeing and how do you feel about it?
SKYLER: I still really align ourselves with New York. I feel way more excitement and pride being from New York than I would being a London band right now. I think in a lot of ways New York’s kind of the underdog, which sounds hilarious at first, but for a while it’s been a city that hasn’t had as much attention on it. I think something that they’re suffering from is bands dogpiling on the recent success of a few bands. I think there’s a lot more room for creativity in New York.
To answer your question about the New York scene, it’s very strange because I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint a scene. It’s been us and our friends Catcher. We’ve been friends for a while and we’ve played a lot of shows together. That’s kind of what our scene has been, if you can even call it that. It’s moreso a group of friends who play shows together. There’s a lot of cool bands from New York, but they’re not really tied together. You have Geese and Gustaf and BODEGA, but we’re not hanging out in bars together or anything like that… There [are] different scenes in New York that are really not connected with each other. All these bands are still very prominent in New York but we never crossed paths just because there’s so many different little scenes and circles. It’s a very disjointed community.
NICO: It’s also hard because the precedent for a scene in New York is exactly like CBGB's. It’s one place, a tight-knit community, whereas it’s so hard to even tell what is the scene in New York.
LUNA: You’ve gained a lot of traction and attention within the last few months, but I feel like this EP has been a long time coming. How do you guys feel now that it’s finally done?
SKYLER: I think you’re very correct when you say it’s a long time coming. We’ve released things in the past that I think we were always beating around the bush from the way we actually want to sound. The pandemic forced us to re-evaluate what we were doing. This EP is the product of that. It’s a product of us stripping away a lot of our conceptions of what a good band needs to be. It took a long time to get to that point. We’ve been playing together for six years now and only in the past couple years have I felt like we were doing our own authentic thing.
NANDO: It takes a long time, especially for people who moved to the city for the reasons that we did, to find their voice. It doesn’t come instantly. I think over the pandemic we finally realize who we want to be as artists and musicians and as people and as a group. I think that the EP is finally what we all feel comfortable with.
LUNA: During the period of time where you’re trying to figure out your voice as a band, was there anything in particular that made that switch for you? Did anything change that allowed you guys to make that realization?
SAM: I think one of the biggest things was getting a practice space. Prior to that, the way that we were writing music was at a laptop, mostly with Sky and I sitting at a computer and [coming] up with ideas. The way that we would rehearse music was we would practice at NYU, which is where we went to school… We would take our amps there in suitcases and we would practice in that room. That was up until we got our own practice space… Once we made that switch, it conjoined the writing and the rehearsing process. We were no longer writing at the computer because we were able to leave our amps there, we were able to leave our guitars there, everything stayed in that room. It made that our space in a way.
LUNA: I think your EP is very consistent even though the songs sound very different from each other. I get a bit of post-punk, indie rock, and shoegaze. What kind of music were you guys listening to while writing the EP?
SKYLER: The pandemic was a time where we were consuming as much art as we could. I remember we were listening to a lot of The Jesus and Mary Chain that summer; we were listening to a lot of My Bloody Valentine… It’s interesting people pinpointing the influences because it’s always very very scattered. That’s because this EP… it has a bunch of different elements that we want to eventually blend into one.
I wouldn’t go as far to call us a shoegaze band, or I wouldn’t go as far as to call us a post-punk band. And that’s very deliberate. We’re mostly committed to doing what sounds come more intuitively to us.
We were listening to a lot of music, but we were also watching a lot of movies. I got really into this movie Fallen Angels from Wong Kar-wai and it has a lot of influence on the music and when we were starting to work on the visuals.
LUNA: How do movies factor into your music in terms of inspiration?
SKYLER: It’s less so the narrative of the movie but the way that the visuals are done. I like the blurriness, especially when it comes to cities. When people make cities seem blurry and fuzzy, that’s kind of how I feel like I interpret big cities like New York. New York is always portrayed as the hustle-and-bustle very clean cut go-do-this, go-do-that. But when you’re actually living it and you see all this buzz, it’s way more softer and blurrier and fuzzier.
SAM: We’re also really into a lot of David Lynch and stuff. I really appreciate the dreaminess of his films and his work. Personally, I think in a song like “Ohm,” the last track [on our EP], I feel a sort of dreaminess there. There’s a really good behind the scenes clip on [David Lynch] during the Twin Peaks return filming, he’s like freaking out at a producer or something and he’s like, “We don’t have any time to get dreamy anymore. There’s no time for it.” That’s how I felt that summer we were describing earlier, where we would go to that practice space and we had all the time in the world to get dreamy. I think it’s a really important thing that is kind of hard to come by.
LUNA: I love that you brought up “Ohm” because I think that’s a standout track in the EP.
SKYLER: It’s our closer in our set. It’s probably the most cathartic I’ve felt playing on stage. It’s funny — it’s something that we almost didn’t release or didn’t get back into. I think now we can all say that song in a way is a sound we’re all very drawn to now and definitely want to bring a lot of what that song is into our next music.
SAM: We played it, I believe it was in Brighton the last time we were here. We were playing the song, and during the end of the song, I looked over at Nando. I’ve never really seen anything like it. He had his eyes closed and his head tilted up a bit… There was something about it where it’s very rare to see somebody just completely disconnected. They’re fully just in the thing they’re doing. I just looked over at him and I saw him playing this part… I could have easily cried, like I definitely teared up. And that’s the only time in our set where something like that can happen.
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