Starcleaner Reunion’s amorphous pop songs are as big as universes

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Starcleaner Reunion like to joke that they are a supergroup. Not of bands in New York City, where they now live, but of the kids who cut their teeth playing DIY shows in New Jersey church basements and at the grimy Montclair venue, The Meatlocker. The members are only in their early 20s now but go way back; singer Jo Roman sat in front of guitarist Pat Drummond in science class, while bassist Adam Kenter met guitarist Neil Torman before high school. They all played in different bands as kids but never together, even though they often talked about it. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that they stopped idly tossing links to Stereolab and Saint Etienne songs into the group text and set about actually making music as a unit. “Our tastes and similarities only grew stronger with time,” Kenter says. “We just needed some time to jam and have fun with it and it.”

That was in 2022, soon after drummer Sam Unger joined and the band released their debut EP Club Estrella, a collection of playful and exuberant sketches that bubble with the energy of five pals making good on their ideas. But it’s their latest EP, Café Life, released in September, that embodies “the most fully formed vision of what we’re trying to do,” Torman says. The band uses the tongue-in-cheek term “Euro-pop,” a descriptor gifted to them by a live promoter, as a catch-all term for their music. It gets at the sophisticated nonchalance in their music. They worked with Ruben Radlauer of Model/Actriz to create songs that are tied with knotty musical ideas yet float by like a refreshing summer’s breeze, exemplified by the grungy, meditative standout “Birds On Power Lines.”

The band’s musical patchwork is stitched together by Roman’s hypnotic vocals. She describes her writing process as “traversing around” in her thoughts and jotting down “random prose” as it comes to her. She says she feels “victorious” when performing “The Hand That I Put Down,” a song on which she sings about taking control in between guitars that alternate between snapping and fizzing.

Roman is loath to prescribe too much personal meaning to any one Starcleaner Reunion song: “I want to make sure the listener can also explore something themselves within the song and get a different meaning from it.”

That “choose your own adventure” approach to songwriting is a big part of the Starcleaner Reunion universe; Torman says that exploratory world-building is the number one topic of discussion for the band. “That way you create something that’s more than just an EP,” he says. “You create a place that you can take the listener to and they can get lost there.”

Part of that transportative experience is Café Life’s lurid artwork. Designed by the French artist Paul Descamps, it depicts a bunch of slimy and neon characters, including a top-hatted guitarist and two dogs kissing, gathered around the stoop of a building only identified as being open 24 hours a day. It could be viewed as sleazy or like an AI advert for one of those cheaply planned family events that go awry. The band found Descamps work online and only had one instruction for him: “Draw something disgusting.” They say having him involved is one of the few things they instantly agreed on, chiefly because his images feel diverting. “We just didn’t want it to look like a rock record,” Drummond admits.

Like their beloved Stereolab, Starcleaner Reunion want to be what they call a “nucleus band”; the kind of band whose musical nods and references send the listener down wormholes of new and palette-expanding music. The group say they got into everything from krautrock and drone music to ‘60s Brazilian artists Antônio Carlos Jobim and Os Mutantes. They, too, enjoy planting musical easter eggs deep into the mix of their songs and have buried field recordings of rain and thunderstorms into moments of Café Life.

Waxing lyrical about the band’s biggest influence, Drummond establishes the bar he hopes Starcleaner Reunion will clear. “[Stereolab] are a group where, even from the very start, they had a very specific and unified vision to their entire project. Everything they do is another opportunity to expand this vibe that they’re going for. Like, you know, a Stereolab song just by reading the song title. That is so cool.”

Does looking to the past for influence mean Starcleaner Reunion has attracted older fans? They say it’s a mix, but every once in a while “an old head will freak out” after one of their shows. “There’s a certain type of ‘50s guy who’s like, ‘wow,’” Drummond jokes. “But we love it.”