Written by Lauren Rosier
Chillwave four-piece, Small Black, announce their first album in five years. Cheap Dreams is described as “Long Island gothic surf epic” and is currently scheduled for release on April 4, 2021, via their new label, the vaporwave startup, 100% Electronica.
To celebrate, the band has announced the debut single from Cheap Dreams, “Duplex,” a track that captures an “abstract portrayal of urban loneliness” and “small town parking lot isolation.”
You can pre-order Cheap Dreams here and can also grab a limited edition Red Rain vinyl via 100% Electronica here.
“We finished writing & recording ‘Duplex’ way before the world shut down last March,” says lead singer Josh Kolenik, “but the lyrics seemed oddly prophetic to me as we were doing the final mix. ‘Walking in the house alone – Pray on the ottoman – Amen for one’ I was originally thinking about the absurdity of feeling alone amid the 9 million of us in NYC and yet suddenly, we were all isolated without much of a choice in the matter. In those weeks spent listening to the quiet out our Brooklyn windows, only broken by the occasional siren, unsure where the city or the world was headed, the song took on a new meaning.”
Small Black was founded in 2009 in Brooklyn and were at the forefront of the chillwave scene in the early 2010s. After three LPs and multiple incarnations of the band, the four-piece became a touring machine across North America and overseas over the last ten years.
After five years, Cheap Dreams finds the band focusing on where they are from and where they’ve been. The record pays tribute to Kolenik‘s uncle, a man who was a passionate surfer, whose attic they used in Long Island to make the first album. A little bit after their 2015 album, he passed away. Much of Cheap Dreams is about his life and “how it reflects the band’s choice to live out theirs as musicians.”
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