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Music

For Small Black, It’s Darkest Before the Dawn, But the Sunrise Is Beautiful

We're premiering Small Black's rad new single "Back at Belle's" but really we spent the entire interview talking about aliens, the apocalypse and moving past grief.

The Long Island and Washington DC natives who make music as Small Black first set up shop in Brooklyn over a decade ago. They’ve seen their neighborhoods change, rent rise, and community characters fade away. Over time, their own backyard has evolved just as inevitably as their musical sensibilities. But Small Black aren’t defined by their setting or a genre label. The words Williamsburg and chillwave mean as much to their music as it does to any false sense of trendy authority or relevance.

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Since the band’s 2010 debut New Chain, the members have grown as creators but simplified their methodologies. Taking steps away from the “super maximal interlocking tracking” of their first LP, their forthcoming follow-up, Best Blues, will be their most spare but powerful record yet. Their use of analog and acoustic instrumentation spread over a yearlong recording process was deliberate: It allowed the band to artfully yet simply create a record they feel is an original form of dance music. The time for reflection and revisiting was key to their sessions throughout their New York homes and isolation in the Catskills. The routine change of scenery was necessary for a group of guys who are always pushing to be better, sometimes revisiting a track five times. This exhaustive attention to detail means they’ve created a record that’ll translate perfectly on stage.

I met with Small Black over some cheeseburgers to discuss the album, a track off of which we’re premiering below. “Back at Belle’s” was inspired from a master notebook of track titles. Its loopy-vocals and warbly synthesizer help tell a short narrative about a wronged party—be it a lover, friend, or someone you’ve lost. The notion of that person returning connotes an image in your head, a dream of bringing that person back. The looming what-if?

Enjoy the Farfisa organ-backed optimism the band has to offer before jumping down a rabbit hole of speculation while Small Black discuss Ufology and conspiracy theories, before seguing into the cathartic nature of Best Blues—a resolution of loss and cleansing.

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We’ve been talking about this too long for me to not ask formally, what’s up with Small Black and aliens?
Juan Pieczanski: I mean, God, where do I even begin? As a band we talk a lot about this stuff in the van.

Josh Hayden Kolenik: We drove back from Pittsburgh once, and I’m kinda the alien skeptic, I put my headphones on and I read an entire book and they had been talking about aliens for the entire eight-hour drive.

Juan: Josh gets sick of hearing about it. We were listening to a five-hour podcast about ETs and this breakaway civilization and a secret space program and abductions. Whatever you can imagine, it’s endless. Jeff is a healthy skeptic, but we’re also really into sci-fi, so for me this is an extension where there is actual real life evidence of stuff you would actually love in a sci-fi film or book.

Jeff Curtin: The thing with conspiracy culture now is that it’s really just become an exercise in rearranging the facts and seeing what you can prove based on the facts.

Is it semantics?
Jeff: No, you really make it into an argument if you really believe it. There’s a guy who’s arguing the Flat Earth Theory again. If you look on the internet, if you want to find any information that backs up any point you can find it.

Are these conversations serious or ironic?
Juan: It’s in a serious way. We’ve gone to conferences about Ufology. I have personal connections. I have a family friend who’s been abducted by aliens his whole life. We’ve met people on tour that have had UFOs land on their family farm. There are tons of ex-military and ex-CIA guys that talk about it pretty openly. It’s not even really a conspiracy anymore, there’s such an abundance of evidence that it’s a more of a sociological phenomenon that it’s happening but it’s still considered a conspiracy theory.

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So you truly believe aliens exist?
Juan: There’s just way too much evidence to still treat it like a funny thing. You have real professors teaching college courses on Ufology and abductions and Harvard researchers doing 10-years of research.

Jeff: Not to mention all the government money that’s been put into it.

Juan: The government denied it, but then it’s come out through the Freedom of Information Act that they’re actually not only interested but have had dozens of programs to study UFOs. On one hand they’ll say, “This isn’t real, you guys are quacks…” but on the other hand they’re spending millions of dollars to study it. You need to wonder what that’s about…

Imagine filling out a FOIA and then getting back a 1,000-page mostly redacted document…
Juan: Little things like that have come out especially when FOIA was first happening, they realized it was a huge mistake, so they’ve been pulling the reels back on that. When it first came out there was a lot of released UFO FOIA stuff, you’ve got memos from the president talking about crafts that they’ve seen and military conclusions that it was extra-terrestrial.

Are they the stereotypical green with round heads?
Juan: There are no green aliens. There are grey-hued aliens. There are more orange-hued aliens. Apparently the CIA has classified something like 57 species of aliens that they’re aware of. There’s like this manual that circulated in the CIA community. You can look at pictures, drawings and photos. Like everything, there’s a lot of disinformation so it’s hard. A lot of that disinformation has been provided by the CIA. We could talk about this forever.

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You guys just dig this out-there speculation…
Jeff: It’s worth entertaining. I think the point of the whole culture is to not take anything for granted. Do the research first before you write something off. Otherwise that’s not responsible.

Juan: With the internet, more and more people are open to this. Statistics are going crazy, the number of people who believe the US knows about UFOs and is covering up is growing. Now American’s believe that there’s some sort of UFO cover-up by our government. That’s changed a lot from the early days. That’s a testament to all the stuff online. It used to be really hard to get this information, you had to have packets mailed to you, and like sketchy people you couldn’t fact-check their background.

When you guys are on the road are you always having these deep philosophical conversations?

Josh: It get’s pretty heavy. Talking about theories about life, relationships, and children. The future is something we’re very concerned with.

Are you concerned with your future or the world’s future?
Josh: The world’s future. It seems like a disaster is on the horizon. These guys built an apocalypse food kit so we can get away. We have a big plan in case the apocalypse comes, a certain amount of supplies, hidden in undisclosed locations throughout Brooklyn.

What will our doomsday look like?
Josh: The environment is gonna kick out first.

Then will humanity start crumbling?
Josh: It’s not gonna crumble, but it’s gonna change.

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Juan: Massive amounts of people around the world are gonna die in huge numbers due to food and water shortages and disease. The US in response will keep beefing up its borders and military because all this stuff is collapsing around us.

Once the coasts become uninhabitable will we move to the Midwest?
Juan: Yes, then people will be like, “Don’t get in my property!”

Josh: New York real estate is a hot market right now but in 2K40 it might not be such a good investment.

Continued below.

Have you ever typed Small Black into YouTube? It’s mostly clips of Jack Black.
Jeff: If you look us up, you get a lot of hits for handguns, purses and missing dogs. Juan: “Gloves on sale!” “Small black child lost, AMBER ALERT!”

There’s also a clip from Men in Black.
Juan: That movie is a total disinformation campaign.

Let’s actually talk about music. You’ve explained before that you like the idea of a song growing past its original meaning. Does that transformational nature help its lifespan?
Josh: I’ll be singing a song live every once in a while and think to myself, “Oh, I thought this song was about this part of my life, but maybe this verse is more current to me,” and it hits something that I’m going through at the time. That’s exciting to me. If we’re going to keep playing them we need to find new life in them otherwise they’re just going to become stagnant. A song like “Despicable Dogs” on our first record it sounds pretty drastically different if you see us play it now and it feels very different to me emotionally from where we started with it. That’s what the band has always tried to do. Evolve and try not to regurgitate what we’ve done previously.

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When you’re writing lyrics is it an intimate experience or does it draw from things that are happening in the world around you?
Josh: It’s pretty personal. It’s pretty internal a lot of the times, exploring my own and our own experiences with each other, with family, with relationships and how they can all blur together and become part of whatever the narrative of our lives is.

Is that a deliberate decision or is it just what flows when you pick up a pen?
Josh: It’s just what I write about. This album was trying to get past that and trying to exhaust my own personal feelings and get beyond the self. I’ve been focused on myself for a long time, and maybe it’s been too long. That selfishness can be, it can fuck up your life. It can be overboard and distract you from what’s important and what’s gonna stick around.

Do you see a bit of a narcissistic streak that inherently comes with writing songs about yourself?
Josh: Writing songs and creating art and thinking people should see it in general, there’s already a bit of narcissism.

Juan: That’s what we always liked about the project that musically it can go anywhere but there’s this lyrical anchor that’s personal.

That being said, even in your videos it’s not like you have your faces plastered all over them. They actually don’t even include you at all acting or performing, so there’s no narcissism on that front.
Juan: Maybe that’s to push a little bit against that. It might be over the top.

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Josh: It just feels a little inauthentic to be singing a song into a camera and not really be singing it.

What kind of headspace were you guys in while recording this record? You were stepping away from writing solely about personal stuff? But what was going on in your guys’ lives while recording this?
Josh: The cover image is a photo that my dad took. His house got destroyed; it had five feet of water damage in Hurricane Sandy. We ended up cleaning the whole house out and I spent months archiving all these photos and saving a lot of family stuff that had been underwater. I feel like it had been painted as this harrowing experience in previous press but it actually ended up being a really positive experience for my family. We went through all this stuff that no one had looked at in years that was just sitting there as this ominous shed full of our past. We ended up finding things that we never would’ve found and connecting on a deeper level. A lot of the idea of Best Blues as a title means to me that sometimes you’ve got to go through the worst stuff to figure out where you are and what is really important to you. I wouldn’t have known as much about my dad and my sister if we hadn’t gone through this experience together.

Your last record was touched on the limits of intimacy and connectivity between people. Is there an overall theme in this record? Even though you don’t like imposing how people should interpret…
Josh: The aesthetic is about how in loss you can find a new and more positive perspective in looking at your life. For me a lot of the songs get back to the point that you’ve got to hit the bottom to find the good stuff and sometimes you don’t see it until the rug is pulled out from under you and you have nowhere else to go.

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It’s always darkest before dawn… that type of thing?
Josh: Yeah, I think that is true with a lot of stuff. I don’t want this to be cliché. [Sighs.] I love sad music and I think in sad music there’s a lot of power. A song, it can really, I’ve had a lot of songs that have helped me through hard times, it’s empowering to write a sad song and say “This really bummed me out. I was really depressed about this.” I know that I want to share that and I want to get over it. I want it to be done.

You’re flushing out your system?
Josh: Yeah. A lot of the records I loved in high school were super depressing, Belle & Sebastian, Elliot Smith, I don’t look at that stuff as too sad, it’s really, it made me realize that someone was going through the same thing I was. That’s what I always wanted to do as a person who writes lyrics.

Is that what’s happening in this album?
Josh: Dance music doesn’t have to be as cold and icy as a lot of the stuff I hear today, and that’s always how I try to do it, make something that’s a little more accessible from an emotional standpoint.

Juan: The music doesn’t have to be sad. There’s a lot of upbeat stuff on the record, in fact some of the most upbeat moments might have some of the saddest lyrics but I always listened to sad music growing up. Take Yo La Tengo, super intimate sad records, at the time growing up they weren’t too popular, and I was like “Man, that’s a sad record and no ones listening to it!” But I was.

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Jeff: That is what we all share in common. We don’t write from a place of anger or aggression, there’s some of this, some bubble pop, there are a lot of ways to portray music, and we all write in a thoughtful nostalgic kind of place.

You’d mentioned other journalists kind of had this sad takeaway, but that’s not exactly what you’re going for…
Josh: It’s a whole record. It’s not all sad. It’s about trying to get past whatever is coming up and haunting you.

Were there other things haunting you besides dealing with Hurricane Sandy?
Josh: My mom died when I was young, in my early 20s, that whole experience, pulling all that stuff out of there, our family moved, and we put all our stuff in this house, this little shed in the back of my dad’s new house, and we never looked at it ever again, it kind of forced me to go through it and just face this thing that’s just kind of been looming over my dad and my sister and I forever that’s just been honestly just impossible to get past. It’s something I’ve always talked about in our songs but I’ve been shy to talk about in an interview because I never want someone to feel bad for me. It’s just some things, once you have that thing in your life you know you could just start crying at any moment if you really start thinking about it. I didn’t use to have that, but now I always carry that with me. Making music is a way to cope with that and deal with it and make some sense of it.

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Do you feel in a better place now?
Josh: It’s like any sort of tragedy. It feels good to talk about it. It feels good to share it. It’s changed how people deal with grief. Every person, I’m in my 30s now, a lot of people’s parents have passed at this point, and I’ve seen tons of people post these remembrances of their family, and I guess you never really had that connection unless you were with a person, personally. At first I was a little embarrassed, then I realized it was a very cathartic and important thing for people, even if it’s as stupid as on your Facebook feed just to know that other people have gone through the same thing. You’re not alone in it. It’s really powerful.

I think that comes with age, reaching that point where you can relate to others’ experiences and feel better talking about the darkest times.
Josh: It feels really good just to discuss it, especially for someone who’s gone through the same thing. If a song can do that for someone, that’s the point to making it.

Juan: We’ve had people come up to us on tour and say that a particular song was listened to on loop while going through something, that’s some of the most rewarding stuff. Being able to help people deal with whatever they’re dealing with.

Josh: Whatever we do is worth that conversation.

Small Black Tour Dates Sun. Oct. 11 - Richmond, VA @ Strange Matter

Tue. Oct. 13 - Atlanta, GA @ The Earl

Wed. Oct. 14 - New Orleans, LA @ Gasa Gasa

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Fri. Oct. 16 - Austin, TX @ Red 7

Sat. Oct. 17 - Dallas, TX @ Club Dada

Tue. Oct. 20 - Phoenix, AZ @ Valley Bar

Wed. Oct. 21 - San Diego, CA @ Casbah

Fri. Oct. 23 - Los Angeles, CA @ The Roxy Theatre

Sat. Oct. 24 - San Francisco, CA @ The Independent

Mon. Oct. 26 - Portland, OR @ Doug Fir Lounge

Tue. Oct. 27 - Vancouver, BC @ Biltmore Cabaret

Wed. Oct. 28 - Seattle, WA @ The Crocodile - Back Bar

Thu. Oct. 29 - Boise, ID @ Neurolux

Fri. Oct. 30 - Salt Lake City, UT @ Urban Lounge

Sat. Oct. 31 - Denver, CO @ Larimer Lounge

Mon. Nov. 2 - Kansas City, MO @ The Tank Room

Tue. Nov. 3 - Iowa City, IA @ The Mill

Wed. Nov. 4 - Minneapolis, MN @ 7th St Entry

Fri. Nov. 6 - Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall

Sat. Nov. 7 - Detroit, MI @ UFO Factory

Sun. Nov. 8 - Toronto, ON @ The Garrison

Tue. Nov. 10 - Montreal, QC @ La Sala Rossa

Wed. Nov. 11 - Burlington, TV @ Signal Kitchen

Thu. Nov. 12 - Boston, MA @ Brighton Music Hall

Sat. Nov. 21 - Brooklyn, NY @ Baby’s All Right

Best Blues is out on 10.15 via Jagajaguar.

Derek Scancarelli is now 49% convinced aliens exist. He’s on Twitter.