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Oct 13, 2025 By Caleb Campbell

After spending years as a sideman一touring and recording with Los Angeles-based indie outfits Man Man and Tyler Ballgame一singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Sam Small debuted in 2018 with his EP, Hazel. In the time since, he’s been working on a new album with his backing band, Drugs Bunny. The full album is due out next year and finds Small and his collaborators pulling from an eclectic swirl of indie singer/songwriter, roots rock, and psychedelic touchstones, including Wilco, Velvet Underground, Kurt Vile, Adrianne Lenker, and Caroline Rose.

Today, Small is sharing the record’s first single, “Sometime in December,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Sometime in December” winds through its cyclical shifts with a gentle ease, guided by twangy guitar lines and meandering pedal steel. It is at once melodic, elliptical, psychedelic, and reflective, as if the listener is following Small down an intersecting tangle of forest trails, getting steadily more lost but always finding themselves at the same place they began. Small’s main vocal melody repeats constantly, modulating the key for the chorus before returning to the sprawling psych folk blend of the verses. The vocal melody only departs for a serene synth detour and a climactic sun-blazed guitar solo outro.

Meanwhile, Small’s lyrics meditate on moments of domestic simplicity, broken by loss with the aching chorus: “ There’s rust on the stove / I can hear the copper clacking at the first fall of snow / It gets real cold in New Hampshire…But now I’m just beating the tears back / And I’m just scared / All my best days I do the pretending / But here it is again / Take me back sometime in December / Before you disappeared.”

Small says of the track, “I wrote ‘Sometime in December’ shortly after my dad died and it all came to me in one sitting. I was completely torn apart at the time and felt like an emotionally volatile crazy person. It took practice to play the song without choking up. The verse images are all snippets from my childhood and the chorus is the realization of losing that. The chords and melody fell in place as if they’d always been there. I became so mesmerized by the melody that when it came time to find a chorus, I knew it couldn’t stay where it was so instead of writing something totally new, I modulated the key as a way of adding a sense of tension and urgency and then released it back to the original key for the next verse. While this song is deeply personal, I hope listeners will find their own meanings. We all experience loss and I’d guess a lot of people grew up with strict rules regarding the thermostat. Maybe a select few were fed on buckwheat pancakes too (1 to 1 water to flour ratio).”

Check out the song and video below, out everywhere tomorrow, October 14th.