Today, the Los Angeles based quintet SML (bassist Anna Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, drummer Booker Stardrum, and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann) announce a new live album titled Spontaneous Music Live, out on LP, cassette, and digitally June 26 via International Anthem.

The forty-eight minute live album comprises two side-length pieces of unedited improvisation, recorded live at Los Angeles venue Zebulon during the band’s December 2025 residency just weeks after the release of the band’s critically-acclaimed second album How You Been. Spontaneous Music Live was recorded and mixed live in stereo to analog tape by Bryce Gonzales (the engineer who is known for his transportive documents of Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, including the recently-released Happy Today). The album’s 24+ minute B-side piece “Roundabouts” is available as a lead “single” on all digital music platforms today.

Listen to “Roundabouts” and preorder Spontaneous Music Live here

Photo by Ariel Fisher for The New York Times

In a glowing New York Times feature published last November, writer Grayson Haver Currin profiled the rise of SML as a band “vital to a surge of enterprising jazz emerging from Los Angeles.” At the time, even aside from the work with SML, each member of the band was mid-stride in their own respective hot streak, and in the mere 6 months that have elapsed since, there’s even more to report. Stardrum released his WeJazz debut, Close Up on the Outside, in February. Uhlmann released his solo debut for International Anthem, Extra Stars, in March. Johnson and Butterss are key contributors to both Flea’s debut solo album Honora, released by Nonesuch in March, and the new Jeff Parker ETA IVtet album Happy Today (released by International Anthem / Nonesuch on May 15). As a band, SML did six performances to full-capacity crowds over three nights as artists-in-residence at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee this March. So the timing feels perfect to take a deeper look at the essence of what SML does in pure, uncut form.

Between How You Been and SML’s 2024 debut Small Medium large (both of which were heavily edited, shaped and post-produced), the band has developed a reputation for records that are heavily fused, polished, and punchy. The medium is on full post-modern display on those LPs, and the band’s post-production knife can be responsible for much of the perspective—the tastiest morsels collected, arranged, and rearranged just so.

But the source material from both those albums were live recordings. Longform, unwieldy, ebbing and flowing. On top of that, every performance the band has ever done has been fully improvised in that spirit. So in the sphere of live performance the band’s esteem has grown down a different path — one of linear, hypnotic, expansion. It’s a perceived split persona shared by some of SML’s most inspiring conceptual bedfellows: compare the extended madness of Can’s Live in Paris 1973 to the relative tight form of Future Days from the same year; the speed-funk chaos of Miles Davis’ Dark Magus to the heavily deconstructed On The Corner or Big Fun.

Spontaneous Music Live removes the curatorial perspective and pulls the curtain back on that search-pluck-reconstruct editing process. What we’re left with is the psychedelic realism of the band in situ, in their home town, collectively improvising, fully in-the-moment, mining for that moment of discovery. We hear, in macro, each nugget of sound which could be the basis for a future SML album track, spattered amongst the collective chaos-and-control like stars in the night sky.

Today’s announcement comes as SML prepare to headline two nights at Los Angeles’s Teragram Ballroom on June 26 and 27, as part of Aquarium Drunkard’s 21st Anniversary celebration. About SML, Aquarium Drunkard founder Justin Gage says: “For the last 21 years, Aquarium Drunkard has gravitated toward artists who treat music as a living environment rather than a fixed product, and SML embodies that spirit completely. Their sound feels uniquely Los Angeles to me: exploratory, rhythmic, spacious, deeply collaborative — the kind of music that changes the atmosphere of a room on contact.” Find more info and tickets below.