Album of the Month: SML – How You Been
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LA's premier sideman supergroup refines their collaging technique into something progressive, sprawling, and infinitely interesting.
Los Angeles in the 2020s is experiencing a creative renaissance. The city's jazz scene has become a musical petri dish comparable to Cologne and Düsseldorf for the birth of krautrock, Canterbury for late-60s progressive rock, New York for No Wave, or Chicago for the Tortoise-adjacent sounds of the 90s. At the centre of this ferment sits SML, a quintet of prolific musicians who have become LA's definitive sideman supergroup.
The Supergroup Equation
SML comprises bassist Anna Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, percussionist Booker Stardrum, and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann. Between them, they've appeared on records by Jeff Parker, Ariel Kalma, Perfume Genius, Phoebe Bridgers, and countless others. They represent the core of a new school within the Los Angeles jazz and improvised music scene that breeds infinitely overlapping combinations: Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet and Expansion Trio, the Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes trio, Anna Butterss's own band (as heard on 2024's Mighty Vertebrate), and various other solo and ensemble projects.
Unlike yesteryear, where players would hold fast to their jazz roots, this generation of Angeleno musicians ventures freely into indie, experimental music and pop, bringing a diverse sonic palette back to jazz. The result is music that exists in a liminal space where genre boundaries dissolve entirely.
The Hyperrealist Collective Approach
Released November 2025 on International Anthem, How You Been represents a breakthrough in SML's musical language. Their debut Small Medium Large, lauded by critics, was constructed from analog tapes of the band's very first, modest shows at Highland Park LA venue ETA. How You Been was built with a higher level of self-awareness and a far deeper pool of source material.
The album was crafted via extensive post-production of recordings from shows at Zebulon in Los Angeles, The High Low in Los Angeles, Public Records in New York City, Empty Bottle in Chicago, and Tractor Tavern in Seattle between July 2024 and March 2025. Behind the success of the first album, the band approached every performance as a generative opportunity to hone their sound and document their expansion across a new landscape of audiences, venues, and cities.
Here's the crucial detail: despite the premeditation driving their commitment to record every moment, the band started every show without musical direction, improvising intuitively and completely. You have eight sets of material, over eight hours of music to sift through. The challenge was distilling this into a concise expression of what they do rather than presenting a boxset of raw documentation. What's remarkable is that each member of SML is a seasoned producer on their own merit. The perspective on what moments to expand upon with the post-producer's knife and glue is five-strong. Each member's proclivities get their chance to filter the always-evolving elements of the group concept.
The Alien Sequencing Core
How You Been is a hypnotic banquet of alien electronic sequencing, splayed jazz drumming, and essential bass grooves with a seasoning of warped guitars and saxophone for flavour. Jeremiah Chiu's modular synthesis forms the record's interdimensional core and deserves commendation for its range and creative hysteria. As easily as he provides bubbling, pinprick percussive sequences, Chiu pivots toward spectral pads and odd samples akin to Oneohtrix Point Never or Cristobal Tapia de Veer.
For much of the release, the rest of the quintet follow Chiu's otherworldly lead but with a measured approach to maximalism. "Chicago Four" sounds like Silver Apples, electronic and percussive sounds bouncing off each other, seeming to gain energy as they go, before Uhlmann's guitar glides in, brisk and muscular but gloriously idiosyncratic. All this plays off against thick sheets of synthesised melody.
"Taking out the Trash" is a perfect pace-setter, a punchy nugget encapsulating the essence of SML. Chiu's percussion synth establishes the groove before Stardrum and Butterss drop in on a heavy breakbeat. Uhlmann comes in with a searing, plucked staccato funk line that would give Glenn Branca and Larry Coryell something to high five about. The spidery guitar work recalls math-y groups like Horse Lords or Battles. Things eventually trip into a total breakdown, with only the percussion synth still looping. When the band explodes back in, the key has changed, and Johnson is letting loose on a wailing, distorted saxophone solo.
"Stepping In/The Loop" provides a wonderful centrepiece, with delicious tension between chaotic rhythms, bright synth chords, and the most minimal of refrains. The jolting rhythmic displacement showcases the quintet's ability to interlink beneath skittish sequencing. "Old Mytth" is a standout, with a clear Philip Glass influence in its approach to counterpoint.
The Alien Interludes
Even the briefest pieces, barely a minute long, burst with ideas. "Plankton" centres Butterss's low-end melodicism and high-string visitations surrounded by skittering tonal chatter from bandmates. The flutterings and warblings create texture and space. "Guttural Utterance", the chopped and degraded electronic opener, sets the tone for an album that refuses to sit still.
"Brood Board SHROOM" is a temporary touchdown on an alien planet where rhythm moves in timeless, breath-like undulations. The track's opening lines evoke the soft throbs of Aphex Twin's beloved ambient works (or perhaps a Robitussen-drenched take on Steve Reich's Different Trains), before frothy curtains of textured sound drape into the mix, overlaying like distant, minimalist symphonies in a gentle, synthetic recreation of free time, slackening and accelerating as each layer of tonal pulses hovers to front and centre or retreats into the distance. It's a gut feeling rather than an academic exercise, all in service of forward motion.
Though rhythmically diverse and sonically dense, the underlying grooves courtesy of Butterss and Stardrum provide solace, making an ambitious release inherently head-nodding. Expressiveness comes through the range of sonic timbres explored, not a never-ending maelstrom of notes.
The Sonic DNA
At inception, the band inspired disparate but distinctive artist comparisons: Essential Logic, Oval, Herbie Hancock's Sextant, and electric Miles Davis, as well as assorted genre touchpoints like Afrobeat, kosmische, proto-techno, and new-jazz. With How You Been, their work manages to both collapse and explode such derivatives, displaying a new, high-resolution version of SML, fully flowered into a new strain of sound.
SML approach kosmische music and proto-techno as if it's jazz, jamming until the sounds lock into what might be recognisable as a particular style or another. Then they build up their legend and break it apart repeatedly, using their skills to question the logic of whatever style they're approximating. As SML has evolved and spread out in space-time, their fluencies, both as an improvising unit in performance and as a production team in the studio, have sharpened.
The album closer "Mouth Words" brings everything full circle. "Is there a way to dim the lights a little more?" Chiu asks at the start. Moments later, SML takes us out with a mid-tempo 4/4 groover dressed in swelling glissandos and punctuated by insistent, rapid-fire phrases from Johnson's alto. By the time this future-funk/lounge-groove closing track eases you into oblivion, it's clear SML have created another special album, one that forges bright new pathways in American jazz.
Within every performance captured for this album is an impressive display of total trust in one another and confidence in their own instincts. This is improvised music at its most engaging, its most immediate. The quintet knows instinctively how and when to work a groove, when to push into chaos, and when to pull back into contemplation.
The music exists in that fascinating space where it might signal a new iteration of jazz, or it might not be jazz at all, or it might not matter. What matters is the sound itself: a colourful murmuration of percussive, glacial synths, and exploratory jazz interplay. Exciting, expansive, and entrancing, SML are evidence of the supergroup's enduring power and proof that Los Angeles is currently producing some of the most innovative improvised music on the planet.
While track sequencing can edge towards clunky territory at times, the album's ambition and execution far outweigh any minor structural quibbles. This is progressive, sprawling, and infinitely interesting trance-jazz from a group of musicians who understand that the future of improvised music lies not in purity but in cross-pollination, not in genre adherence but in fearless exploration.
