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Mar 03, 2021 By Mark Redfern Photography by Caroline Mathis

New York City chillwave four-piece Small Black are releasing a new album, Cheap Dreams, on April 9 via 100% Electronica. Now they have shared another song from it, “The Bridge,” via a video for the song. Samuel Stonefield directed the black & white video, which stars Rece Delo. Watch it below.

Frontman Josh Kolenik talked about the new song in a press release: “The Bridge was the first track we wrote for ‘Cheap Dreams,’ emerging from a piano motif & post-punk bass line into a propulsive beat that marks new ground for the band. The lyric is written from the perspective of my Uncle Matt, who starred in the band’s first music video “Despicable Dogs” in 2009. Matt was a legendary surfer, board shaper, and my boyhood idol - the king of the Long Beach boardwalk. For the last few years of his life, following a sudden stroke, he was stuck surf casting for stripers on the beach instead of out there in the waves. The song is about holding onto the optimism that another wave is coming down the pipe.”

Of the video, Kolenik added: “With the video, we tried to get into a world close to the one Matt inhabited, but rooted in our own NYC summers spent often at the breaks of Rockaway Beach. The architectural loneliness of Rockaway puts it directly between the urbanity of New York and the crash of the waves right in front of it. Director Samuel Stonefield, a long time videographer for Vice News, brought his shrewd eye to capture a postcard of the spirit of the slower autumn season at the shore. We follow actor Rece Delo (TikTok lord / avid skater & surfer) on a solitary day spent hunting joy in the small moments of being alone and the freedom of going exactly where the day takes you… and nowhere else.”

Last year, the band shared the album’s lead single, “Tampa.” When the album was announced, they shared a stop-motion video for its next single, “Duplex.

Their most recent album, Best Blues, was released back in 2015 via Jagjaguwar.

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