Smallpools announce their new album Ghost Town Road will drop September 20th via Nettwerk. The bold new project is an elegy for a bygone era about appreciating the allure of nostalgia while trying not to get stuck in the past. To celebrate the announcement, the band released “Be Kind, Rewind,” an ode to Blockbuster. Check out the lyric video HERE.

The album was written and recorded at guitarist Michael Kamerman’s house in Los Angeles, with collaborations from colin creeV of Third Eye Blind and Mitchy Collins of lovelytheband. As a project that splits time between Los Angeles and Nashville, Kamerman, frontman Sean Scanlon, and drummer Beau Kuther reflected on the evolution of each city in the decade since their debut 2013 breakout single “Dreaming.” “When the band first started, the goal was to play the free Monday nights at the Satellite, that’s all we wanted to do,” Kuther recalls. Once proving ground for ambitious local indie bands, the legendary Silver Lake venue closed permanently during the pandemic. Four years later, the space still lies vacant. Meanwhile, they’ve seen Nashville equally overrun by Brooklyn transplants, reality TV producers and bachelorette parties.  

These are the images that inform Ghost Town Road and the forthcoming full-length, named after a street sign that Kamerman saw passing through a stretch of the Nevada desert. It follows their recent EP Ghost Town Road (east) “There’s not that many of the bands that we started with that are still doing it, so it feels a little bit like a ghost town out here now, especially post-pandemic,” he reflects. Yet, Ghost Town Road is as much a state of mind as it is a physical place, as Smallpools re-acquainted themselves with the Hollywood dive bars and restaurants that served as their communal, creative spaces in the early days. “Drive down Wilshire at night, it feels kind of like a ghost town as well,” Scanlon jokes.