Small Black Best Blues

Small Black is an American indie band fromBrooklyn, New York. They are currently signed to the Jagjaguwar record label. The band consists of Josh Kolenik (lead vocals/guitar), Ryan Heyner (guitar/keyboards), Juan Pieczanski (bass/guitar), and Jeff Curtin (drums). In 2015, they're going to release a new album called Best Blues in October 16th 2015

Brooklyn synthpoppers Small Black have just announced a new album, Best Blues, their first full-length since 2013’s excellent (and underrated) Limits Of Desire. As frontman Josh Kolenik explains to The New York Times’ T Magazine, lead single “Boys Life” was inspired by his experience cleaning out an old shed behind his father’s Long Island house after Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012: “In the melting boxes and floating Sega Genesis games, I found a slew of images and letters of my parents that I’d never seen before — stuff that maybe nobody had seen in 20 to 30 years,” Kolenik says. “I didn’t know who a lot of the figures in the photos were, or who the letters were to, so I spent a week out there trying to preserve and figure out the story.” One of those old photos serves as the cover art for Best Blues, and first single “Boys Life” is about “putting ourselves in the shoes of our parents and seeing our similarities across our different eras.” Fittingly, the song itself is based off of a recently rediscovered old demo track, and it’s another sparkling gem of widescreen, starry-eyed synthpop from a band who’ve been crafting such gems for years. Snatches of twinkling keyboard melodies bubble up, catching the light for a few moments before they’re once again submerged by the soft haze of memory.

Listen below

1. Personal Best
2. No One Wants It to Happen to You
3. Boys Life
4. The Closer I Look
5. Big Ideas, Pt. II
6. Back at Belle's
7. Between Leos
8. Checkpoints
9. Smoke Around the Bends
10. XX Century