Starcleaner Reunion, Umbrella
Umbrella, the debut album by Starcleaner Reunion, is retro-futurist pop music made by four 20-somethings raised in the shadows of a big city. Accordingly, there’s a sweet scrappiness to their songs, patchwork quilts of baroque textures like chugging guitars, glitchy electronica, and
musique concrète sampling. Some thoughts and images that come to mind: a divider in a record bin that says “space age bubblegum krautrock???”; a 1968 Velvet Underground promo poster depicting the band as crayon doodles, later recreated by Galaxie 500; The ‘Life Is Good’ guy lounging in a warm pool of sunlight, favorite song playing on the radio, spliff in hand. Maybe he’s wearing a beret, there’s something Francophone happening here, too.
Vocalist and tambourine player Jo Roman, guitarists Pat Drummond and Neil Torman, and bassist Adam Kenter grew up in the same small town of Springfield, New Jersey. After meeting in high school, they played together in various configurations, bonding over a collective love for
Brazilian psych, C86 jangle, and ’90s noise. It was only in 2022, after Drummond moved to New York from Montreal, that the friends solidified into something beyond swapping song links over text. “We call it a supergroup,” jokes Torman.
They chose the name Starcleaner Reunion after a 1970s children’s book about magical beings that return light to the sky. They recorded their first EP, 2023’s Club Estrella, quickly, with barely a thought for production. There’s an innocence to these early, kaleidoscopic bursts of alt-rock, but also an instinctual familiarity, “which goes back to how long we’ve all known each other and played together,” Torman says. “It’s always very natural.”
After that initial effort, Starcleaner Reunion “learned a lot more about how to make the music sound like it does in our heads,” says Drummond. “How to connect the dots between how we want it to feel and how to make it actually sound that way.” They approached their next EP, 2024’s Café Life, with the intention of expanding the band’s universe. Ironically, they discovered that in order to grow, they needed to backtrack to the place where it all began, the converted carport of Kenter’s childhood home.
Starcleaner Reunion performed live tirelessly after Café Life, fine-tuning their material along the way. In the summer of 2025, after completing their biggest tour to date, the bandmates hunkered down in Kenter’s garage studio. Surrounded by tour souvenirs—stockpiles of gear purchased off Facebook marketplace—familiar songs unspooled in radically new directions. “This is maybe the first time where we were writing without any self-imposed limitations regarding how we’d translate the songs live,” Torman says, describing how tracks were chopped, warped, and reversed. “Eating the Alphabet” evolved into banjo-tinged dream pop, while “Brittle on My Finger” is skittery and woozy, all decaying flowers and “metallic waste in the attic digital memory.”
Umbrella, self-produced once again, is Starcleaner Reunion’s most expansive and ambitious project yet, blending together poetic abstraction, recombinant collage, and sonic craftsmanship. It begins with “Theme,” a hypnotic, modular nursery rhyme. This time around, the instrumentation is more varied, as the band invited friends to add embellishments, which led to sprinklings of clarinet, horns, and violin, the latter courtesy of mixer Ruben Radlauer’s (Model-Actriz) father. They never did manage to get a hold of a proper harpsichord…Swerving in and out of time signatures, the grooving “Never Odd nor Even” concludes with a ghostly sonar courtesy of an instrument of a friend’s “aluminum cello” made from a single string, a sheet of metal, and a contact pickup.
These 11 songs are tied together by Roman’s entrancing vocals and visual prose, fragments of fleeting thoughts, memories, and observations. Her phrases tend toward abstraction, but themes of longing, obfuscation, and indecision emerge on tracks like “Maschine Mockup” and the Spanish-language “Pasillo Piso.” On the vaguely ominous “Tea Drops Park,” she describes a curdled vision of domesticity with a cool remove. “Weather Instrument,” which features Gary Olson of The Ladybug Transistor on trumpet, is a dazzling burst of sunshine, albeit one about yearning for something just out of focus. The lush closing track, “Lay on Plastic Moment,” recalls an uncanny familiarity, a déjà vu daydream: “Greater at night, passing/Phase through the alleyways/Hoping I’ll find, something.” On Umbrella, Starcleaner Reunion grab ahold of that “something” and look towards the future.
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