SML — the forward-thinking quintet of Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, and Gregory Uhlmann — return with their second album How You Been, a bold leap forward in their collective language of experimental jazz and post-genre sound design. Built from live improvisations and carefully sculpted in post-production, the album expands on the approach first explored in their 2023 debut Small Medium Large, now with greater intentionality and a deeper pool of performances.
Improvised with no prior direction, each show was treated as raw material for exploration. The result is a hyperrealist sound: instinctual and communal in the moment, then reshaped through five distinct producer lenses. The band’s DNA — a blend of jazz, kosmische, Afrobeat, ambient electronics, and funk — now blooms into something uniquely their own, a sound as much about feeling as it is about form.
Tracks like “Chicago Four” blend modular synths, distorted sax lines, and polyrhythmic percussion into a swirling, beat-heavy groove, while “Brood Board SHROOM” floats in ambient time, evoking Aphex Twin and Reichian minimalism. Elsewhere, “Taking Out the Trash” delivers body-moving urgency with distorted sax solos and heavy breaks, showing SML’s versatility between deep headspace and high-energy release.
Rooted in LA’s fertile experimental scene, How You Been is both a product of its community and a signal of a new sonic vanguard — collective, unpredictable, and genreless by design.
