Starcleaner Reunion – Umbrella
Rising New York band Starcleaner Reunion announce their debut album, Umbrella, with a video for it’s infectious lead single “Never Even Or Odd.”
On the impressively self-produced album, Starcleaner Reunion blend together poetic abstraction, recombinant collage, and sonic craftsmanship, expanding on their retro-futurist pop sound, tied together by Jo Roman’s entrancing vocals and visual prose, fragments of fleeting thoughts, memories, and observations.
“‘Never Odd or Even’ is about the anticipation of sharing secrets. Some of them can be entertaining while others could reveal dark things. This song explores the experience of a personal secret leaving that protective space in someone’s mind,” Jo Roman explains. “The push and pull dynamic of the music, bouncing between propulsive motorik rush and 5/4 waltz, mimics that trajectory between that excitement and unimaginable darkness.”
Following the release of Cafe Life, their second EP that garnered them attention from outlets like Pitchfork, The FADER, Stereogum and Paste , the band performed live tirelessly, fine-tuning their material along the way, including tours with buzzy acts like This Is Lorelei, Friko and TOPS. In the summer of 2025, after completing their biggest tour to date, the bandmates hunkered down in drummer Adam Kenter’s garage studio. Surrounded by tour souvenirs—stockpiles of gear purchased off Facebook marketplace—familiar songs unspooled in radically new directions. “This is maybe the first time where we were writing without any self-imposed limitations regarding how we’d translate the songs live,” guitarist Neil Torman says, describing how tracks were chopped, warped, and reversed. On Umbrella 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.
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. It was only in 2022, after Drummond moved to New York from Montreal, that the friends solidified into something beyond swapping song links over text. “We call it a supergroup,” jokes Torman.
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, “which goes back to how long we’ve all known each other and played together,” Torman says. “It’s always very natural.”
After that initial effort, Starcleaner Reunion “learned a lot more about how to make the music sound like it does in our heads,” says Drummond. “How to connect the dots between how we want it to feel and how to make it actually sound that way.” They approached their next EP, 2024’s Café Life, 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.
Starcleaner Reunion is Jo Roman, Pat Drummond, Neil Torman, and Adam Kenter.
Starcleaner Reunion will be touring in support of Umbrella, with shows announced throughout the fall that include a headline run in September as well as dates with Blondshell and Bully in October.
Tour Dates:
08/22 – New York, NY @ Emerging Music Festival at Bryant Park
09/17 – Montreal, QC @ La Sotterenea
09/18 – Toronto, ON @ Sound Garage
09/19 – Detroit, MI @ Lager House
09/20 – Chicago, IL @ Schubas Tavern
09/23 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Funhouse at Mr. Small’s
09/24 – Washington, D.C. @ Songbyrd
09/26 – Philadelphia, PA @ Minimart
10/14 – San Diego, CA @ The Observatory North Park *
10/16 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Wiltern * ^
10/17 – San Francisco, CA @ Castro Theatre *
10/19 – Portland, OR @ Crystal Ballroom *
10/20 – Seattle, WA @ The Showbox SoDo *
11/07 – Queens, NY @ TV Eye
* w/ Blondshell
^ w/ Bully
#starcleanerreunion