Formed in 2009 as a bedroom recording project, Small Black first made waves with their eponymous debut EP, recorded in the attic of singer Josh Kolenik’s uncle’s remote Long Island surfboard workshop. With its patchwork vintage synths and casiobeats, the breakthrough single “Despicable Dogs,” cemented them as pioneers of chillwave, the genre so omnipresent in the 2010s.The project evolved into a fully-fledged touring act, consisting of Kolenik (vox/keys), Ryan Heyner (guitar/keys), Juan Pieczanski (bass/guitar), and Jeff Curtin (drums), and this live influence showed on their debut Jagjaguwar LP, 2010’s New Chain. The loopy, weeded-out album found the band messing around with hip hop drums & samples, which they further explored on 2011’s Moon Killer mixtape, collaborating with rapper Heems.

2021 finds Small Black back in the game with a brand new LP, Cheap Dreams out now on 100% Electronica. Lead single “Tampa” harks back to widescreen 80s pop through the lens of a Florida trip gone wrong. While “Duplex” finds the band alone like everyone else in their apartments unsure where the world was headed. The band will head back out on the road in the US in the late summer of 2021.