Small Studio Saturday: Primate House Finished a Decade-Old Record, and It Was Worth the Wait

Primate House’s self-titled record has been in progress, on and off, for roughly a decade. The band – Chris Jones and Devin Gilbert on guitars and vocals, Jeb Polstein on drums, Josh Govier on bass – started as teenagers together in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, cut a debut LP, Feels Good to Feel Bad, in 2015, and began tracking a follow-up the next year. Then adult life happened: careers, families, an indefinite hiatus by 2017 that had every reasonable sign of being permanent. It wasn’t. Earlier this year, Govier went back into those old sessions and finished the job himself – engineering and mixing the whole album – and Primate House came out August 21, 2026, self-released, with no label standing between the band and the record they’d started a decade earlier.

That gap is the reason this is a Small Studio Saturday pick rather than a footnote, but it isn’t the reason the record is good. Bandcamp Daily’s J. Edward Keyes reviewed it in his August 21 “Essential Releases” column and didn’t hedge: “Brooklyn’s Primate House… their self-titled record is a whirling tornado of jagged saw blades and sharp-edged sheet metal… this is the most exciting indie band I’ve heard in a long time.” Keyes’ point of comparison is specific and well-chosen – Polvo and June of 44, bands built around guitar lines that refuse to resolve the way a listener expects. He singles out “American Bro,” which he describes as “surging forward then crouching down, opening into a sing-along chorus before diving back into detuned bliss,” and “Off,” “full of open chords and riding a wonderfully askew rhythm, then exploding into howling guitars.” Both descriptions hold up on a real listen: the guitar interplay between Jones and Gilbert moves in obtuse angles rather than clean hooks, vocal melodies land slightly off from where a chorus usually wants to resolve, and the record never lets a listener settle into a groove before pulling it sideways.

“Off” was the album’s lead single, premiered in July via V13, where Gilbert described its subject as “being trapped living within dreams to avoid the pain of the waking world” – a fittingly unresolved way to describe a song that structurally refuses to resolve either. That tension between deliberately anxious songwriting and genuinely propulsive playing runs through the whole nine-track record, credited by Keyes to a band that “must have heard me” complaining about indie rock losing its teeth, and answered the complaint with an album that has plenty.

A few things are worth being precise about, because the story is good enough without embellishing it. This isn’t strictly “their first LP in ten years” – Feels Good to Feel Bad was a full-length, not an EP, and it came out in 2015, about eleven years before this one. What’s accurate is that these specific songs have been in progress for roughly a decade, shelved mid-tracking and revived by one member’s own initiative rather than a label’s push or a reunion tour’s convenient timing. And while the band is often described simply as “Brooklyn,” that’s where they are now, not where they started – Hastings-on-Hudson is where four teenagers first decided to be a band, long before any of this record existed.

Why this is the Small Studio Saturday pick isn’t the underdog arc, satisfying as it is. It’s that a record assembled from decade-old sessions by a bassist with no formal production background, released with no label and no push beyond Bandcamp and a handful of small-outlet premieres, sounds this alive. Keyes is right to call it the most exciting thing he’d heard in a while – not because of where it came from, but because “American Bro” and “Off” would earn that description from a band with a full label budget behind them, too.

Hero image: Album cover art, Primate House (2026), self-released.