FAVORITES OF 2025!
9/15/26 ADDS
CURRENT
UPCOMING
RECENT
LIVE
ABOUT
STARCLEANER REUNION
Umbrella (Take Care Records)
Add date: 9.29.2026
Release date: 9.25.2026
Links:
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Instagram
Spotify
Take Care Records
Tidal
YouTube
Vocalist and tambourine player Jo Roman, guitarists Pat Drummond and Neil Torman, and bassist Adam Kenter grew up in the same small town of Springfield, New Jersey. After meeting in high school, they played together in various configurations, bonding over a collective love for Brazilian psych, C86 jangle, and ’90s noise. They chose the name Starcleaner Reunion after a 1970s children's book about magical beings that return light to the sky. They recorded their first EP, 2023’s Club Estrella, quickly, with barely a thought for production. There’s an innocence to these early, kaleidoscopic bursts of alt-rock, but also an instinctual familiarity.
They approached their next EP, 2024’s Café Life (released as a limited edition 10” on Take Care Records) with the intention of expanding the band’s universe. Ironically, they discovered that in order to grow, they needed to backtrack to the place where it all began, the converted carport of Kenter’s childhood home.
Umbrella, the band’s self-produced debut album, is Starcleaner Reunion’s most expansive and ambitious project yet, blending together poetic abstraction, recombinant collage, and sonic craftsmanship. This time around, the instrumentation is more varied, as the band invited friends to add embellishments, which led to sprinklings of clarinet, horns, and violin, the latter courtesy of mixer Ruben Radlauer’s (Model-Actriz) father. This is retro-futurist pop music made by four 20-somethings raised in the shadows of a big city. Accordingly, there’s a sweet scrappiness to their songs, patchwork quilts of baroque textures like chugging guitars, glitchy electronica, and musique concrète sampling.
These 11 songs are tied together by Roman’s entrancing vocals and visual prose, fragments of fleeting thoughts, memories, and observations. Her phrases tend toward abstraction, but themes of longing, obfuscation, and indecision emerge on tracks like “Maschine Mockup” and the Spanish-language “Pasillo Piso.” On the vaguely ominous “Tea Drops Park,” she describes a curdled vision of domesticity with a cool remove. “Weather Instrument,” which features Gary Olson of The Ladybug Transistor on trumpet, is a dazzling burst of sunshine, albeit one about yearning for something just out of focus. The lush closing track, “Lay on Plastic Moment,” recalls an uncanny familiarity, a déjà vu daydream: “Greater at night, passing/Phase through the alleyways/Hoping I’ll find, something.” On Umbrella, Starcleaner Reunion grab ahold of that “something” and look towards the future.
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Spotify
Take Care Records
Tidal
YouTube
Vocalist and tambourine player Jo Roman, guitarists Pat Drummond and Neil Torman, and bassist Adam Kenter grew up in the same small town of Springfield, New Jersey. After meeting in high school, they played together in various configurations, bonding over a collective love for Brazilian psych, C86 jangle, and ’90s noise. They chose the name Starcleaner Reunion after a 1970s children's book about magical beings that return light to the sky. They recorded their first EP, 2023’s Club Estrella, quickly, with barely a thought for production. There’s an innocence to these early, kaleidoscopic bursts of alt-rock, but also an instinctual familiarity.
They approached their next EP, 2024’s Café Life (released as a limited edition 10” on Take Care Records) with the intention of expanding the band’s universe. Ironically, they discovered that in order to grow, they needed to backtrack to the place where it all began, the converted carport of Kenter’s childhood home.
Umbrella, the band’s self-produced debut album, is Starcleaner Reunion’s most expansive and ambitious project yet, blending together poetic abstraction, recombinant collage, and sonic craftsmanship. This time around, the instrumentation is more varied, as the band invited friends to add embellishments, which led to sprinklings of clarinet, horns, and violin, the latter courtesy of mixer Ruben Radlauer’s (Model-Actriz) father. This is retro-futurist pop music made by four 20-somethings raised in the shadows of a big city. Accordingly, there’s a sweet scrappiness to their songs, patchwork quilts of baroque textures like chugging guitars, glitchy electronica, and musique concrète sampling.
These 11 songs are tied together by Roman’s entrancing vocals and visual prose, fragments of fleeting thoughts, memories, and observations. Her phrases tend toward abstraction, but themes of longing, obfuscation, and indecision emerge on tracks like “Maschine Mockup” and the Spanish-language “Pasillo Piso.” On the vaguely ominous “Tea Drops Park,” she describes a curdled vision of domesticity with a cool remove. “Weather Instrument,” which features Gary Olson of The Ladybug Transistor on trumpet, is a dazzling burst of sunshine, albeit one about yearning for something just out of focus. The lush closing track, “Lay on Plastic Moment,” recalls an uncanny familiarity, a déjà vu daydream: “Greater at night, passing/Phase through the alleyways/Hoping I’ll find, something.” On Umbrella, Starcleaner Reunion grab ahold of that “something” and look towards the future.