5 Records with Been Stellar

On Been Stellar‘s opening track from their debut album, Scream from New York, NY, vocalist Sam Slocum yells, “New York’s wasted, start again, start again,” with an earnestness that often evades younger NYC rock groups, usually replaced with a menthol-cool demeanor. The quintet hit the ground running, touring with the 1975 and opening for Interpol before even dropping a length record. Now, hyped up, they’ve dropped a mature, fiery first record, born out of the ashes from NYC’s terrifying pandemic era.

Scream from New York, NY is the type of rock record most groups would need years to work up to: Well-paced, tastefully layered, with an appropriate amount of hooks, and a slight feeling that the whole thing could fall apart at any time. On “Can’t Look Away,” “Sweet,” and the closer “I Have the Answer,” the group climbs to skyscraping highs, with shoegaze-y guitar wails, a devastating rhythm section, and Slocum’s gravel-filled affectactious yells. When the dust settles, old heads and younger listeners are sure to look around and ask, “How did we get here?”

In the weeks following the record’s release, the band sat down to discuss their influences heading into their debut, from Elliott Smith‘s drum tracking to Yuck‘s swelling builds.

Skyler Knapp: “I’ve been a fan of The Walkmen for a while, and people kept telling me about Jonathan Fire*Eater, so I started listening to them during the pandemic. It sounded like Nick Cave vocals but with ’90s Pixies instrumentals. It was up my alley, and I also read about their story and what New York was like because they were a band before the early 2000s indie rock boom.

“They were around in the late 90s, and it was a desolate place with no [rock] music industry. Reading about their experience in New York paralleled the pandemic in New York that I was seeing. Also, coincidentally, they lived on the same block we lived on in the Lower East Side. I just felt like a weird kinship to it.

“Paul Maroon’s guitar playing is really influential to me and pretty wild.  It’s almost like spaghetti western riffs. I’ve become addicted to it. I think it was in the back of my head when we were writing this record. Also, the drumming on it was something we had in mind and were trying to build guitar bits around.”

Sam Slocum: “The main thing that sticks out to me about this record is the sequencing of the tracks. It has some slow and tender moments, and then there are songs like “Death of a Disco Dancer,” “I Won’t Share You,” and “Last Night I Dreamed Somebody Loves Me.” Then there’s also some of their most upbeat material. One thing that we were thinking a lot about at the time of writing it and then going into recording was how to manage different vibes from track to track. What’s the most effective way of lining these songs up? You don’t want it to just be up and down.”

SK: “Lyrically, the Smiths are always doing better than you. To some extent, it’s because they’re talking about shit that no one else talks about, and they’re saying in such an interesting and beautiful way. So I feel like they’re a platonic North Star to chase for lyrics.”

Nico Brunstein: “For me, Just Mustard was inspiring in getting back into new music. I had a hard time during COVID-19 listening to new music, and they were one of the first bands that reinspired me. As a band, that’s a big one because we all gravitate toward older music.

“The five of us saw them at South By Southwest two years ago. We were all just jaw-dropped. Sky had seen them at Union Pool a couple of weeks prior, and he was trying to get us into them. When we saw them live, we were completely floored. We became pretty close with them and then went on tour with them that fall.

“I feel like what I [took from] this record was to just keep things as simple as possible, even to the point where you’re playing one note half the song, which I don’t know if I ended up doing, but I always tested it to see if it worked for the song. We started to use a lot of maybe the same songwriting techniques that they were using, seeing what we could take in and borrow from their  style and see if it stuck, and a lot of the times, it would start a cool idea.”

SS: “This album is a posthumous release that [Elliott Smith] was recording right up until he died. I picked this one because of a similar thing for the Smiths, but I really like how heavy this album sounds at times. I think the production on the guitars always stuck out to me. It forces you to put him in a different light.

“The album we hear is not what he intended. I know that he intended for it to be a double album, and it was going to start in one genre and then devolve into an entirely different sound. There are leaks on YouTube, and you can hear more of a change for that. I just like how odd it is at times.

“On the first track and then also on ‘Shooting Star’ and on the last track, ‘A Distorted Reality is Now a Necessity to be Free,’ he double tracks the drums. He’s obviously always known for double-tracking guitars and other instruments, too, but to double-track drums is something I hadn’t heard done before.”

SK: “I remember I sent this to Laila (drums), and we became obsessed with how the songs build. I remember when we were writing the more “epic” tracks on the album, and this record was in the back of our minds. It’s so cool. It sounds like a ’90s Smashing Pumpkins or Sonic Youth album, but it’s really an enigma because it also did sound like its own thing but still wears its influences on its sleeve. I don’t think people talk about this album enough.”