Small Black

Before he spent time in a cabin on Long Island writing what would become the debut EP by Small Black, Josh Kolenik was in a rock band called Slowlands that played around New York to some acclaim. But when Kolenik moved on to writing his synth-centric material as Small Black, his music caught the attention of people well beyond the Five Boroughs. In the beginning, the project’s output had a kind of icy, mechanistic style that somehow also managed to sound like a collection of lo-fi synth-pop songs found on old stock tape abandoned in the early ’80s. With its latest release, New Chain, the band doubled its roster to four with an expanded footprint to match and an immediacy that suggests that it won’t stay small for long.