Like so many other dyed-in-the-wool New York bands, Been Stellar are transplants. Guitarist Skyler Knapp and vocalist Sam Slocum first met in their freshman year of high school a decade ago; members of the cross country team, they bonded over the band t-shirt Skyler was wearing and decided to start jamming together.
In Michigan, they started performing under the Been Stellar name, but it wasn’t until the pair began studying at NYU, and met Brazilian-born guitarist Nando Dale, bass player Nico Brunstein and drummer Laila Wayans, that a sound started to coalesce. Despite working in wildly disparate styles – Nando and Skyler bonded over British bands like The Cribs; Nico was making electronic music, and Laila rave – the group bonded over a shared sense of humor, forming a motley crew based more on emotional compatibility than any rigid ideas of shared artistic sensibility.
In many ways, the band formed to fill a need: by the time Been Stellar found themselves in New York, the last vestiges of the city’s famed 2000s and 2010s DIY underground had been ground down to nothing. The scenes that did exist felt impenetrable. So the band put on their own shows, renting spaces and collaborating with friends to build the world they wanted to inhabit.
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https://beenstellar.com/
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