Been Stellar is an NYC-based five-piece made up of vocalist Sam Slocum, guitarists Skyler Knapp and Nando Dale, bassist Nico Brunstein, and drummer Laila Wayan. None of the members are native New Yorkers – Slocum and Knapp started performing under the Been Stellar name in Michigan, but it wasn’t until they went to NYC that they met the rest of the group; Wayans and Brunstein arrived from California, while Dale is from Brazil by way of Sydney. Upon discovering that the DIY scene they dreamed of being a part of had effectively just died, they learned how to stage their own shows and cut their teeth playing in the few venues that would have them. Eventually, they caught the attention of the UK indie label So Young, which released their self-titled EP in 2022. They went back on the road, supporting Fontaines D.C. and Shame, and signed to Dirty Hit last year. Their debut album may be wryly titled Scream from New York, NY, but in many ways, it shares the spirit of the Irish post-punk bands they’ve toured with as much as the New York luminaries that serve as foundational influence. The four singles preceding the release attest to the band’s versatility; as a whole, the record is as gauzy as it is guttural, menacing yet tender, and emotionally raw even as it muses on the ineffable. There’s hope amidst the unrelenting noise, even when you can’t find the words for it.
We caught up with Been Stellar’s Sam Slocum, Skyler Knapp, and Nico Brunstein for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about the band’s journey, their relationship to New York, their shared language, and more.
Skyler and Sam, you met during your freshman year of high school a decade ago. Do you mind sharing your first impressions of each other? What was your friendship like at the time?
Skyler Knapp: Sam had been going to this school that we went to – he was on the track from middle school to high school, but I was a transfer student, so I went to a middle school in a different town and then transferred into his high school. So, I didn’t know anybody, I didn’t have any friends. But I remember, from really early on, I was like, “I’m gonna go to this school, and I want to start a band again,” because I had a bunch of bands in middle school that kind of simmered out. I was like, “I need to find someone who I can do music with.” I tried out for the tennis team but didn’t make it because I’m really bad at tennis, so I had to do another sport and joined cross country, where I happened to meet Sam.I was wearing a Vampire Weekend shirt, of all things, and Sam was like, “Oh, that’s cool, you like Vampire Weekend?” From there, we became really good friends and soon started working on music together. It was mostly just him and me in his room at his house, making stuff on his laptop. By the time we were juniors or seniors in high school, we started playing shows with a band of people we had put together, and we realized, “Oh, this is way better. This is actually what we want to be doing.” We graduated high school, we both got into NYU and moved there. We met the rest of the band within the first couple of weeks of being at NYU, and the rest is history.
Sam, what was it like from your perspective?
Sam Slocum: Kind of similar, I guess. I had band since 5th or 6th grade – I think it was the summer before middle school when I first started playing music with friends. We had a band that I will not be sharing the name of, and then there was another group I played in. I had an older cousin who turned me on to indie and alternative music. I was really into bands like Starfucker and MGMT, who are still bands I love. When Sky and I met, it was definitely one of those moments where you just click with somebody. When we started recording stuff, I remember we were always talking about it as a side project. We were still doing things with our old bands, so we were recording, but at the same time we were making stupid videos; it did just feel like were just being creative without any big goal in mind.
SK: The creative energy was really interesting because our old bands were playing really different things. My first band was very White Stripes-y, almost Nirvana-y – the guitar was always distorted, I never learned how to play guitar itself without it being run through a ton of crunch. I remember the first time Sam and I jammed together, he was like, “I guess we should just plug in,” and I was like, “Aren’t we gonna run it through a pedal or something?” And he was like, “Nah, just play clean.” I was like, “Fuck, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before.” I came from a more distorted guitar rock world, while Sam grew up playing piano and had more of the musical foundations already down. We became best friends and still are to this day. When you’re around someone all the time, you start to speak the same language. Now, luckily, the band, with Nico, Laila, and Nando, has reached the same point. But those were fun, innocent times – just two teenagers in Michigan with no one else who liked music and nothing else to do, because it was a really boring town. We were just messing around.
SS: Totally. We’ve been saying recently, with all the relative success we’ve found in the past year or two, it just feels like this joke keeps going further and further. Obviously, we take this more seriously than anything else in our lives, but at the root of it, there was just this playful energy, trying to have a good time and let something out. When we met Nico, Nando, and Laila, it was very organic because we just met by circumstance. We were all living in the same dorm, and Laila was in the same program as Nando and Nico. It was crucial for us to all find the same things funny and just enjoy being around each other, and we all did. We focused on playing live, and it wasn’t until we started to get to the end of college that we really hit a stride with getting on the same level creatively and in terms of collaboration – up until that point, it was still kind of me and Sky writing everything. Then everything changed once COVID happened and we started jamming together. I’m very proud of how we’ve all learned to collaborate, because it’s a difficult thing when you’re younger, learning to let go of ownership over ideas and trying to serve the song, no matter whose idea it is. I think the key to it, for us at least, is we’ve found that comfortability with each other on a personal and friendship level. We’re incredibly close and spend a lot of time together, whether it’s about music or not.
Nico, what was your relationship to music before you joined the band, and when did you feel like it was really coming together in that way?
Nico Brunstein: Music was a later thing for me. I started learning bass and making stuff on my laptop when I was 16. I didn’t have much intention to do music in college, it was more of just a hobby. I had my own cover band in high school, which was fun doing with friends, but I always wanted to write stuff. When me, Nando, and Laila started in the band, it was just fun playing live, but it wasn’t a real creative outlet. And yeah, during COVID, when there were no more live performances, there was a really deep reflection of what this meant for me and Laila. Right when the pandemic started, Sam, Sky, and Nando started renting a practice space in Ridgewood, and they were just writing for fun, without much intention behind it. I was studying for school and Laila was busy with work, but we would come in every month or two and we would get caught up on a lot of the ideas. I think that iteration of us focusing on writing music that we all enjoyed playing and had input in was really important for the change of direction in the band.
Tell me about your relationship with the city’s music scene. What appealed to you or made you feel disillusioned around it?
SK: I always knew I wanted to move to New York and do music since I was a little kid. The biggest thing was all the bands that come from here and how inspired I was by them – I was really obsessed with the idea of this alternative lifestyle that people were living. I think a lot of it is because growing up in Michigan, it’s a great state, but very sterile and boring. I didn’t really feel like it wasn’t a place I belonged. New York has that effect on most people in the US, or even beyond – it’s where you go to see crazy things or do crazy things, and I was always very attracted to that. In high school, I was really into New York bands like DIIV, Beach Fossils, all of that stuff, and it seemed like this healthy, organic scene where they were all playing at the same few venues, and the DIY thing was booming. It seemed really exciting. And then we moved to New York, and it was like we moved just as they all basically closed. The Silent Barn, the last sort of vestige of that era, closed a week after we got there. There was really nothing cool as far as DIY venues, and the same three 250-capacity rooms around New York were really expensive and difficult to get booked at.
There wasn’t much cool music in the vein I thought there would be. There just wasn’t anything exciting or any kinship that we felt with other bands. We had to start throwing our own shows, not in venues, because venues didn’t want to book us. We would rent out art galleries through an app called Peerspace, where you could rent a place for like a hundred bucks for two hours, and we’d charge five, ten bucks at the door. That’s how we had to do it basically until we got signed at So Young.
NB: Well, there’s a couple that would have us.
SS: There definitely were. Here and there, we’d get an opening slot at places like Baby’s All Right, which was a big deal for us the first time we opened there, or get put on a four or five-band bill at Mercury Lounge. But, to Sky’s point, we never actually felt good about doing that kind of thing. It didn’t really feel like the space we wanted to fill. It just felt like no one in that crowd was enthusiastic about going to a show with five bands on the bill. It’s not curated; it was just thrown together and mismatched. For lack of a better word, it’s not cool. It’s hard to believe in, really. We played those gigs, but the first time we actually felt in control of the space we were filling was when we rented out these galleries, had friends display art, and played. We did it all by ourselves, and I think people really enjoyed it. Obviously, I don’t think the shows sounded great, necessarily, but the energy felt more like, “This is cool, we’re actually taking ownership of what we’re doing. We don’t fee like pawns in a weird, almost corporate-y New York scene.” That was really big for us.
SK: I couldn’t really believe it, because every other era in New York had produced stuff, but no one was being vulnerable with their music. Everything was tongue-in-cheek, like, “We’re an ‘80s glam revival band.” If you took it too critically, you were missing the point. It was all a very annoying, ironic thing. That was the thing that struck me initially: None of these people are actually giving me anything to believe in. No one’s really committed to writing a good song. It all felt like a waste of time. There were definitely some feelings of doubt that I had; I wondered if I had moved to the wrong place. But the thing about New York that’s always exciting is that if you keep turning enough rocks, you’ll find something cool. It’s not always guitar music – I remember the first time we went to a DIY venue called the Glove, this illegal gallery space that closed. They put on insane experimental bands – not that we make experimental music, but the first couple times I went to those shows I was like, “Now we’re talking.” Even if it’s someone doing a noise set where they’re screaming their head off or whatever, that person’s really just putting themselves out there and being very committed. That filled us up with a bunch of hope.
SS: New York was a very confusing place, it still is. Musically, there were these polar sides to the scene –you were either doing a cookie-cutter, borderline cover act or it’s a guy an illegal art space triggering samples on the soles of shoes. [laughs] It felt weird because we were neither of those things. We wanted to make music that’s accessible and catchy, but we’re trying to make something really honest. It was a weird few years, but I think it made us really driven.
When did New York become something that you realized was at the center of your debut album, rather than something in the background?
SK: I think our first record was always going to be our New York album. New York is the unifying thing between the five of us. It’s been like a sixth member of the band – figuring out how New York works, how the New York music scene works, has always been a unifying factor for us. This is kind of what we’re about, and I find it an interesting New York story to tell. To some extent, I’m very wary that we’re transplants here – we didn’t grow up in the city, we’re not poor immigrants, so I’m very conscious of taking up space when it comes to New York stories. But at the same rate, when you look back at the lineage of New York music, a lot of it is stories of people who move here because they have something they really want to do, and they can’t do it anywhere else. I think in a lot ways, that is exactly our story, so it was inevitable for it to be about that.
On a more direct level – more of what the album has lyrics referencing to – is the fact that living in New York is a very difficult, all-encompassing, hyper-sensory experience all the time. You’re constantly reminded of the city itself just by virtue of going about your day. You’ll be working a job and the train will be late, or you’ll see someone do something crazy; even when you’re trying not to think about it, something always catches you out. Not to get all spiritual or whatever, but it’s like an organism of its own, and it’s always trying to remind you that it’s there. Living in a place like that, I find it very difficult not to talk about it all the time.
For you, Sam, was it always at the forefront of your mind, or did it gradually become the main theme?
SS: I don’t know how conscious of a thing it was, I think it just happened naturally over time. Sky and I talk a lot about the lyrics and themes. One thing we were drawn to before – Sky was a philosophy major, and I studied writing, some critical writing and theory stuff, so naturally we were drawn to big existential or philosophical ideas, and that was just naturally what we would talk about sometimes. This time around, I think we moved away from that a little bit. Some of the songs, like ‘Start Again’ and ‘Can’t Look Away’, specifically deal with New York, but for the rest of the songs, New York is the setting – obviously, an imposing one, and it sometimes drifts into being more than just a setting. The title of the album was something we had for a long time; it was just a funny turn of phrase I thought of when we were freshmen in college. Once that was brought back up, it just made sense. We didn’t overthink it, and I’m really proud of how naturally it all flowed for us.
You recorded the album in New York, but you wrote parts of it while we were on the road in the UK, and you’re on a UK-based label. Do you think there’s a part of the album that’s less about living in the city than feeling distant or haunted by your vision of it?
SS: At least in my mind, those ten songs all take place in the city. We did the vast majority of the writing and working on these songs in the city. There were only a couple of instances where we had to write on tour; there was really only one song we were finishing on our first tour in the UK, ‘Passing Judgment’, which coincidentally has the least references to the city and feels a bit disconnected. The bulk of ‘All in One’ was finished on the road when we were touring with Shame. But everything else in between, we were here in the city, just living our lives, working out jobs, practicing 4 or 5 days a week.
SK: I’ll say this – the reason why we worked with so many British people is because they kind of just took to the music way more than people did in New York.
SS: It’s poetic.
SK: In some way, it fuels the influence of the record. Because this record isn’t us claiming to be these New Yorkers telling their story – New York has always been this untouchable, distant thing, even while we’re living here. Moving to New York has always been this golden ideal that we’ve been separate from. In a lot of ways, it makes sense that people outside of New York take to it more because that’s a more relatable feeling. We’re not trying to be the sound of New York – this album is an ode to our fascination with the effect the city has had on us, as outsiders in many ways.
One motif is this idea of words failing you or escaping you, and the lyrics themselves fall somewhere between raw and obtuse. I’m curious if the limits of language is something you’re conscious of when you’re writing, especially when you’re writing about a place or a memory.
SS: Yeah, definitely. It’s kind of hilarious to try to write lyrics for an album whose main theme is that words aren’t enough. It’s a bit difficult when you start to overthink it. But the way I was trying to approach it, Sky and I got interested in mixing really personal, raw lyrics with stuff that’s universal. Sky studied Heidegger in college, and at the end of my degree, when I was writing my final paper, I was really hooked on this theory of the work of art, where he talks about how art reveals itself and this opening of truth that happens when you recognize that art was made by a person who really felt those things, recognizing that this is someone’s reality being transmitted through art.
SK: We were also really into William S. Burroughs’ cut-up method – not necessarily talking about specific books, but his philosophy behind a really good work of art or story. He believed that if you write a strong enough poem or story and cut up every single line, rearranging them completely, you’ll be able to get the same feeling because there’s this spiritual quality that’s there.
How would you describe the musical language you share as a group?
NB: I think the fact that the five of us have been friends for so long, and now that we’ve been touring for the last three years – just being in a van together, honestly, helps this kind of broader cohesion. I feel like since touring, we’ve been a lot more like on the same page creatively. I think a big part of it is we’re all kind of listening to the same thing when we’re in the van, but also, we’re just understanding each other a lot more as humans. I feel like when we’re writing songs, sometimes we’ll throw out references in terms of what we’re going for, like a specific guitar part or drum part, but overall, the songs came together on their own. The album feels really cohesive without there having been conversations like, “Oh, it’d be really cool to have a song like this.” I think the best songs, and the songs that ended up on the album, were just songs that the five of us were super happy with and there wasn’t much of a conversation behind them. It was just more of like a innate response where we’re just all looking at each other, jamming to it, knowing that this is something special.
SK: I think that’s the reason why all of us have kept doing this for so long. There’s no experience like being with five people, and you’re doing something where you don’t even need words to explain what you’re doing. It’s going to sound super cheesy, but you’re speaking through the instrument that you’re playing, and this natural, universal emotion comes across everybody. That’s what makes it worthwhile. As soon as you try to put that into words, you are getting away from this platonic ideal of whatever emotion it is you’re trying to convey. Words will only distract you from this pure experience that you have when you when you’re making a piece of collaborative art.
SS: The closest other experience that I can compare it to is really falling in love with somebody. There’s times where you’re not speaking and you’re laying there looking at each other – one person will smile, and then the other person will smile, and you’ll keep looking at each other, and the rest of the world just kind of melts away. I feel like that’s the same moment, when the music’s really good and you’re really not thinking about it too much – what people call the flow state, where you’re fully in it and all that exists is the five of you: that’s when we’re really the closest and and speaking the most, in a way.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Been Stellar’s Scream From New York, NY is out now via Dirty Hit.
