Alt Pop Trio Smallpools Embodies Duality In Bold New Album ‘Ghost Town Road’

Alt-pop trio Smallpools embodies duality in their anthemic new album Ghost Town Road. The cinematic release is an elegy for a bygone era, understanding the allure of nostalgia while trying not to get stuck in the past. Listen HERE.

Written and recorded at guitarist Michael Kamerman’s house in Los Angeles, with collaborations from colin creeV of Third Eye Blind and Mitchy Collins of lovelytheband, Ghost Town Road is rife with everything that fans have come to expect from Smallpools – arena-ready hooks, impeccable production, music that crosses genre barriers without ever losing its definition. The album features music previously released off their EP Ghost Town Road (east), as well as the band’s most recent singles “Be Kind, Rewind,” “Socio Empath,” and “Paperweight.”

Ghost Town Road announces a bold new era for Smallpools, while also a spiritual heir to the 2013 self-titled EP that started it all. “I feel like our debut EP was a definitive body of work, we were dialed in,” vocalist Sean Scanlon muses. “With this project, we’re dialed back in.” Kamerman views it less like a sequel and more like a franchise reboot – “The other music exists and you’re free to revisit it,” he states. “But we’re back and we mean it.”

When it came time to write their next chapter, Smallpools – whose members are based between Los Angeles and Nashville – traveled back in time to 2013 for inspiration for Ghost Town Road. “When the band first started, the goal was to play the free Monday nights at the Satellite, that’s all we wanted to do,” drummer Beau Kuther recalls. Once a proving ground for ambitious local indie bands, the legendary Silver Lake venue closed permanently during the pandemic. Four years later, the space still lies vacant. Meanwhile, they’ve seen Nashville equally overrun by Brooklyn transplants, reality TV producers and bachelorette parties.

These are the images that inform Ghost Town Road, named after a street sign that Kamerman saw passing through a stretch of the Nevada desert. “There’s not that many of the bands that we started with that are still doing it, so it feels a little bit like a ghost town out here now, especially post-pandemic,” he reflects. Yet, Ghost Town Road is as much a state of mind as it is a physical place, as Smallpools re-acquainted themselves with the Hollywood dive bars and restaurants that served as their communal, creative spaces in the early days. “Drive down Wilshire at night, it feels kind of like a ghost town as well,” Scanlon jokes.