Living together in a Brooklyn house, the Small Black members take a layered approach to songwriting, adding and stripping elements until a song feels right, no matter how far it's deviated from the original inspiration.

"Josh will have a lyric and it will inspire us to start laying down some parts, [and] we'll end up doing sometimes 10 versions of the song," Pieczanski says, "adjusting the lyrics and the musical structures. [And] sometimes we start from scratch. We have a weird process that sometimes works backwards, but we ping-pong back and forth between lyrics and music.

"We definitely have a kind of assembly line. We each have different skills. Our drummer is really good at mixing, because he does a lot of that on the side, so he gives a great polish to everything afterwards. Everybody has a say and puts their stamp on it, but as a group we decide whether each individual thing works."