SML have shared a live video of The Drums, filmed and edited by Charlie Weinmann at Zebulon in Los Angeles. It’s the A-side of Spontaneous Music Live, the LA quintet’s new album, released on June 26th via International Anthem.
The album marks a deliberate turn for the five-piece — bassist Anna Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, drummer Booker Stardrum and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann. Where the band’s 2024 debut Small Medium Large and last year’s How You Been were stitched together from improvised fragments, then edited and post-produced, Spontaneous Music Live leaves the editing out. Its two side-length pieces were captured uncut to analogue tape during the band’s December 2025 residency at Zebulon — the same venue where this video was shot.
The Drums runs the A-side; the 24-minute Roundabouts takes the B-side. What you watch is what was played: the band working through an idea in real time.
The video premiered via SML TV, the band’s own aucio-visual offering on International Anthem’s YouTube channel — and the strand is worth a wander in its own right (watch below). SML pitch it as anti-algorithmic visual chaos, and the 64-video playlist holds up the billing. There are old adverts (a 1997 Menards spot, a 1991 Sizzler promo), how-to footage and archival interviews: Thomas Dolby demonstrating synthesizers in 1982, A Guy Called Gerald playing analogue gear in his studio, Henry Kaiser interviewing Terry Riley, the trailer for the Milford Graves documentary Full Mantis. Experimental film sits alongside — John Whitney’s 1968 motion-graphics work, a Len Lye short from 1936, a James Duesing animation.
The music ranges wide and unhurried: Weather Report’s Waterfall, Toumani Diabaté live in 1989, Eugene Skeef’s Ogene-Udu rhythm study, a Wayne Shorter and Gnawa collaboration, Raymond Scott’s 1959 Cindy Electronium, Aphex Twin’s Orphans, Virgo Four’s Chicago house, Ryan Paris’s Italo-disco Dolce Vita, a sunsetcorp vaporwave edit, even a twenty-minute qigong routine.
It doubles as a map of the band’s own orbit, too, gathering SML live clips — Three Over Steel, a 2025 Empty Bottle set, a World Cafe session — next to member and label-mate work: Uhlmann’s Burnt Toast, Butterss on the history of the bass solo, Chiu in session for Elektron, and Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet concert film Happy Today.
Watch the live set and SML TV below:
Spontaneous Music Live (June 26th, 2026) International Anthem