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. An indie-rock debut for the ages, Scream from New York, NY announces Been Stellar as gimlet-eyed chroniclers of contemporary youth, staring through noise and confusion into the dark heart of modern life.
Like so many other dyed-in-the-wool New York bands, Been Stellar are transplants. Guitarist Skyler Knapp and vocalist Sam Slocum first met in their freshman year of high school a decade ago; members of the cross country team, they bonded over the band t-shirt Skyler was wearing and decided to start jamming together. In Michigan, they started performing under the Been Stellar name, but it wasn’t until the pair began studying at NYU, and met Brazilian-born guitarist Nando Dale, bass player Nico Brunstein and drummer Laila Wayans, that a sound started to coalesce. Despite working in wildly disparate styles – Nando and Skyler bonded over British bands like The Cribs; Nico was making electronic music, and Laila rave – the group bonded over a shared sense of humor, forming a motley crew based more on emotional compatibility than any rigid ideas of shared artistic sensibility.
In many ways, the band formed to fill a need: by the time Been Stellar found themselves in New York, the last vestiges of the city’s famed 2000s and 2010s DIY underground had been ground down to nothing. The scenes that did exist felt impenetrable. So the band put on their own shows, renting spaces and collaborating with friends to build the world they wanted to inhabit.
When the world came to a screeching halt during the pandemic, rich with free time and unable to perform, Been Stellar began to think critically about moving past their influences into a sound they could call their own. The group worked doggedly to find it, eventually landing on a sound that felt classic but not beholden to the classics, experimental but never obtuse.
When touring returned, Been Stellar dove in headfirst, supporting Fontaines DC and Shame, piecing together ideas for their debut album on days off in scrappy rentals. Back in New York, they committed themselves to the double grind of writing at their rehearsal space while balancing day jobs, intent on proving that the acclaim they received after their debut EP wasn’t a fluke. When it came time to record, they recruited British producer Dan Carey, mastermind behind the legendary underground label Speedy Wunderground, who helped them tap into all the disparate elements of their sound that had been percolating: forceful, driving physicality; pop classicism; gnarled beauty; and a rich emotional core.
The resulting album is gleaming and grimy in equal measure, capturing the gravity of the band’s adoptive home and the cosmopolitan potential of the world beyond it. After covid, it felt like cracks were beginning to show in the city’s polished surface; remnants of the old New York began to show through in the form of LES lifers they met while tending bar or people they saw on the street. Scream from New York, NY refers to the ambient noise of the city: the fact that you might hear a scream, from the street or a subway car or another apartment, at any time. That image brought up a universe of other ideas, about disconnection, loneliness and language breakdown that manifest throughout the record.
On “All In One”, a ferocious late-album highlight that sees Laila’s powerful, tectonic drumming coming to the fore, Sam sings about finding universal understandings through the prism of mundane work life. His lyrics, raw and elusive in the same moment, sound like truths issued from a state of half-sleep: “I know/And you know/That we’re built to last/Not to grow.” The chaotic mirror of “All In One” is “Passing Judgment”, another masterful deployment of unbearable pressure and violent relief. It’s on “Passing Judgment”, which is sprawling and finely-tuned in equal measure, that most clearly reveals Been Stellar’s years of playing together; a heart-racing post-punk barnstormer, it finds each part of the band in perfect alignment, creating an agonizingly suspenseful atmosphere.
“Pumpkin”, a gauzy, soft-toned ballad that recalls the wounded romantic missives of Celebrity Skin-era Hole. Over a bed of warm guitars, Sam sings about the cryptic codes embedded in domesticity, an “ordinary house” providing the backdrop to unspoken tension. Distinct from the rest of the record, “Pumpkin” is honeyed but bitter. Its subtext-laden tone is a far cry from “Sweet”, the raging centerpiece of Scream from New York, NY. White-knuckled and cutting, “Sweet” is a nihilistic anthem that builds from melancholic 90’s dream pop to guttural, rough-hewn rock, the band’s frenetic, interlocking rhythms threatening to disintegrate at any moment; as the song crests, Sam raises his voice to something nearing a scream, belying the song’s appeal for honesty. In transmuting his lyrics into pure sound, Sam strikes upon an idea that infects the entire record, and which he articulates on the title track: They don’t make words for this.
The songs that make up Scream from New York, NY are caught in a constant battle between strength and fear, love and self-loathing, embodying the spirit of a city that makes and breaks its inhabitants on a daily basis. It’s 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.
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