Welcome to AP&R, where we highlight rising artists who will soon become your new favorite.
Like so many before them, Been Stellar aren’t originally from NYC but followed the path carved out by a long trail of greats — the Velvet Underground in the ’60s, Liquid Liquid and Blondie in the ’80s, the Strokes in the 2000s. But their love for the city runs so wide that they created an entire album, Scream from New York, NY, indebted to its sprawling heft — akin to the visceral feeling of leaving your window cracked open at night and hearing the city squall back at you.
When we connect on a Friday afternoon earlier this month, three of the members — Skyler Knapp (guitar), Nando Dale (guitar), and Sam Slocum (vocals) — are hanging in the backyard of their Bushwick apartment complex, their own “little slice of heaven,” as Knapp describes, where they rehearsed and wrote most of the album. Drummer Laila Wayans dials in from her own device, and bassist Nico Brunstein is at work, but even through a screen, the band exude the same intention, ambition, and depth that’s refracted in their music. They playfully slam the Dimes Square scene (“It’s a party that you’re not invited to,” Knapp laughs), speak reverently of their tourmates, and are eager to delve into hyperspecifics surrounding the LP, like how they set up a row of amplifiers to create the towering sound behind the back-half cut — and huge Scream highlight — “Can’t Look Away.”
Read more: The Strokes albums ranked: From worst to best
The Dan Carey-produced record is a proper entrance for the NYU alums, where the urgency and grime of the city break through every song. It’s all meant to conjure a live intensity, sounding as if it could rip apart at any second, and they’ve had plenty of practice. Without a full-length to their name, the NYC five-piece have opened for Shame, Interpol, and, most recently, the 1975, playing sets that emphasize bite over romanticism. “There’s this whole feeling right now in New York where everybody’s silently looking at each other in these DJ set rooms, and they’re nodding at each other like, ‘Yeah, it’s happening again. Meet Me In The Bathroom,’” Slocum details. “I just find it fake. I don’t know why people are so hellbent on making something happen again when life is so exciting right now.” Instead, Been Stellar are rediscovering what they thought they knew about the city, prioritizing their community, and laying down their own history along the way.
Do you remember the first artist that you saw live?
SKYLER KNAPP: For me, it was this band called Squeeze — this band from the U.K. in the ’80s. That was the first band I ever got into, and it’s funny, they don’t really go hard live. They go pretty chill live, but it was a very, very good show.
LAILA WAYANS: Mine was actually Gwen Stefani. It went hard. I went with my dad, but I was really young, and it was my first concert, so I fell asleep, and I remember he was so mad. He kept being like, “Wake up, wake up,” and they were playing “The Sweet Escape,” and I was just asleep. [Laughs.]
KNAPP: Wait, were you not into Gwen Stefani? Did you not care?
WAYANS: Oh no, I was down. I liked her. I just was really young, and it was definitely past my bedtime. It was 10 p.m., and I was like, “I can’t do this anymore.”
KNAPP: I bet you’re regretting that every day.
WAYANS: Definitely regretting it, but I still can see it. I can still see the memory, so it’s there.
NANDO DALE: It was Katy Perry during the California Girls tour, and she had the whipped cream spray.
SAM SLOCUM: Aerosmith on the Cocked, Locked, and Ready to Rock tour.
I know Sam and Skyler, you two grew up playing together in high school in Michigan. But when you started to meet the rest of the band at NYU, what kind of things did you bond or connect over when you were getting to know each other?
KNAPP: Well when Sam and I first met each other, there were not many people who were really the music we were into, so he was just the only other guy who was around. Then as far as the band goes, it was interesting. We all had very different music tastes. I think we just really liked being around each other, and we had the same sense of humor, and we all knew that we wanted to do music things in New York. Everybody had their thing. It was the first few weeks of being in a new place, and it’s the little things that bring everybody together. So the fact that we all like to joke around with each other and that we were all willing to play shows was what brought us together.
I’m fascinated by how you’re capturing such a specific time and place within New York City right now. How would you describe the current moment that’s happening throughout the city to someone like me, who’s watching this go down from Cleveland?
KNAPP: I don’t think any of us realized it was happening, really. For the longest time, there were a few bands that were going around in New York and Brooklyn, and we never really felt like we were a part of them. It was kind of cliquey, and it was very difficult to tap into. So, because no one ever really wanted us around or us to play, we always did our own thing, so we didn’t really come up with a scene, per se. But yeah, recently, there’s been a lot more people making authentic music. For a while, it was very revivalist in a bunch of ways. There was a big ’80s revival thing going on, and there was a lack of sincerity in music. You felt like when you were going to see one of these bands, it was like seeing someone…
SLOCUM: It was like a costume.
KNAPP: It wasn’t much of an emotional catharsis, so it just happened naturally around us. I really only noticed it was a thing the past year or so. But New York is interesting in [that] there’s a lot of really talented people here, but it’s not the same as it is in the U.K. where there’s this really massive, heavy music industry presence — it’s just people doing their own things.
Were you all in the same room when you wrote and recorded these songs?
KNAPP: Yeah, a lot of them started as ideas that one or two people had, but we always write as a five-piece, so it always comes to be the actual song when it’s all of us together. Then for the recording, that was a big part of it. Dan really wanted to capture the live energy, so we did basically everything live, and the overdubs were pretty minimal.
Yes, I was going to ask you about working with him because he’s done so many cool records with Squid and Fontaines D.C. What ideas did he bring to the table that helped guide the recording process?
SLOCUM: One of the biggest influences Dan had on the record was for us to use an ambient drone. It shows up a little bit here and there on the album, but we ended up using it on the backend while we were recording it. He would take the guitar signals and then run them through a pedal chain that he was controlling, so he was manipulating the sound in real time, and it was pumping into our headphones as we were playing, and it created this really intense and electric atmosphere, and I think it brought out performances in us that we wouldn’t have otherwise. And he’s known for that. He will do these tactics that are somewhat unorthodox, but there’s an element of surprise with working with him, so it was really special.
KNAPP: The other thing I’ll say about Dan is he literally breathes music to a level that I haven’t really ever seen before. He has these very visual reactions to things that he likes and doesn’t like. This last song we put out, “Sweet,” we really wanted acoustic guitar to be on it as a textural thing, and Dan seemed like, “OK, maybe let’s try it.” And so I start recording the acoustic guitar, and I see him, and he has his head in his hands, and he’s like, “No, no, we are not doing that.” We’re like, “I don’t know. I think it sounds all right to us.” He’s like, “No, no. We cannot have this.” We’re like, “OK, all right. Sure, man.”
SLOCUM: Then to me, when Sky was in the studio doing it, Dan looks at me, and he’s like, “I really don’t feel good.” [Laughs.] It was almost like a health thing. This is making me feel bad.
DALE: Check his temperature.
SLOCUM: And then the other thing is, too, he’s a very drum and bass heavy — not the genre, the instruments themselves. He’s very focused on them in particular, and the rhythm. Especially with Laila, I feel like he was very instrumental in zeroing in on little bits that we hadn’t thought about.
WAYANS: Before Dan came into the picture, I was playing the same beat [in the first and second verses on “Passing Judgment”], and then one day he was like, “What if you just did a breakbeat?” It made the whole thing click and took that part so much further, and I was like, “Wow, I can’t believe I never thought of this.” It’s like he’s in our brain, but he’s on the outside as well.
KNAPP: I’d say our biggest Achilles’ heel as a band is overthinking things, and with Dan, there’s no thought. It’s literally all feeling. So that was really very crucial thing to have in the room when we were making it.
With that drone you were talking about earlier, is that why the guitars sound so warbly on “Can’t Look Away”?
KNAPP: That’s the tremolo with four amps being played, buzzing around the room. When we were doing that, I really wanted to capture the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” tremolo thing, and we were talking Dan a lot about that, and we set up four amps, literally as loud as they possibly could go.
SLOCUM: Were they in a circle at one point, too?
KNAPP: Yeah, they were in a line, and we made this tremolo thing happen naturally. That’s why that sounds like it. It was really, really fun.
DALE: It was crazy to just be in the room seeing it played like that. I’ve never heard a guitar sound that big. It was very loud. We didn’t know it could sound like that, you know what I mean? In terms of production, I think that’s a standout in the record.
When you went back and listened to the finished songs from your album, is there anything that jumped out at you or surprised you?
SLOCUM: With “Shimmer,” we went back and forth for a while about whether we wanted it on the record or not. Some of it had to do with finding the right tempo, but it really came to life once we recorded it, and that’s one of our favorites. So that one changed a good deal for us once it was down on record. Definitely the title track was another song with a very long life that’s been around for a while, and now listening back to it, it’s just a trip to hear a recorded version of it. We’ve been playing it for years trying to get it right. I feel like I don’t really listen to the album too much now, but I listened to it a bit after we did it. I mean, the whole thing is kind of surprising to hear, where I’m just like, “Damn, I can’t believe these recorded versions of these songs exist now.”
You’ve opened for the 1975, Interpol, and Shame in the past year. Is there any wisdom those guys have given you or anything you’ve picked up from watching them?
KNAPP: Shame, they bring it every single night to a degree that I didn’t even know was possible for a band to do. I have so much admiration for it because there’d be days where the drive would be really long, and it’d be a bummer, and they’re able to muster this energy from I don’t even know where.
DALE: Steen would climb on top of a rail or something as he’s performing to 20 people in New Orleans. You know what I mean? And he’s just giving it all. It’s so cool to see, no matter what night.
KNAPP: The other thing, too, is they connect with the audience in a way that we hadn’t seen before. I feel like a lot of the bands that we’re influenced by, there’s not as much of that literal head-on-head crowd interaction, and I think that they taught me how important it is, as a member of the audience, to feel like you’re acknowledged and that you exist. Otherwise, you’re watching a movie. Then the 1975, that was just a massive production.
WAYANS: I feel like from them, I learned how far you could take the world that you build around your music. Seeing the stage design every night was definitely really inspiring to see what you could do at a level like that. It felt like a puzzle. Even during soundcheck, I’d see certain books or things that were super specific and then come to find out later that they had meaning to them in real life. Even at that level they would change the set pretty frequently, too. They were always ready to play any song, which I found to be crazy, too, because at our level we were contemplating, “Oh, should we switch out some songs?” Sometimes that can be scary, but they’re at a professional level that they’re able to play any song from the vault, which I think is cool.
