Brainstory

Before the accolades, the albums, the tours and the years spent sharpening their instincts in the studio, Brainstory were three musicians figuring things out in real time. Kevin Martin and his brother Tony grew up in the Inland Empire, where skateboarding and punk rock helped shape their understanding of music as something unruly, communal and self-directed. Eric Hagstrom eventually joined them through a shared love of jazz, and what began as a trio of musicians playing the language of improvisation slowly became something else: a band that could absorb the lessons of jazz without being beholden to its conventions.

That spirit of discovery runs through Shoebox Days, Brainstory’s new EP, a concise collection that doubles as a document of growth and a farewell to an important chapter in the band’s history. Much of the material dates back several years, with some recordings originating as early as 2020 or 2021. At the time, the songs were fragments — grooves, sketches, and ideas that seemed promising but couldn’t yet find their final form. Years later, with Brainstory more assured as musicians, producers and arrangers, they returned to those pieces and finished them.

The title comes from the band’s longtime Long Beach studio, affectionately known as the Shoebox. Though the room was small — almost comically so — it became a laboratory for the group’s imagination. Hagstrom initially acquired the space in 2016 as a place to practice drums. Over time, Brainstory transformed it into a working studio, filling its limited dimensions with instruments, recording equipment and the accumulated detritus of a band learning how to make records on its own terms. At maximum capacity, five people could barely move. Yet within that cramped studio, Brainstory found courage to expand.

By the time they completed Shoebox Days, the studio itself was disappearing from their lives. Shortly after the finished recordings were delivered to Big Crown Records, the band learned that it would have to vacate the spot. The timing was almost too perfect: they had completed one chapter just as circumstances forced them to begin another.

That sense of transition is embedded in the music. “The Watchers,” the EP’s opening track and forthcoming single, is rooted in an Inland Empire urban legend about mysterious figures who would chase cars through a cul-de-sac. Brainstory turns that childhood memory into something cinematic and strange: a spacious, hip-hop-inflected groove animated by trumpet, jazz harmony and psychedelic textures.

Brainstory emerged from jazz, but their music has always resisted the idea that jazz must announce itself through virtuosity. The band assembled around 2010 while studying at Riverside Community College. Kevin and Tony had already spent years playing music together, their sensibilities shaped by punk and skate culture before jazz entered their lives. Money Jungle became a formative record: to them, the 1962 meeting of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Max Roach sounded like jazz with the same rebellious charge they had loved in punk. It showed them that improvisation could be confrontational, physical and free.

Eventually, they realized they didn’t have to choose between jazz and songwriting. They could take what jazz had taught them and apply it to their own compositions.

That idea has remained central to Brainstory’s evolution. Their early records were largely the work of a young band learning how to translate its live energy into recorded sound. But Shoebox Days represents a new level of independence. That confidence is audible on “Twin Kitchen,” a brief, beautifully tailored instrumental inspired by a favorite Inland Empire meal combining burgers, tacos and fries. Like the food that inspired it, the track merges seemingly disparate elements without making a spectacle of the collision. It arrives, establishes its mood, and disappears before overstaying its welcome.

Then there is “Home Alone,” a more overtly song-oriented detour born from the exhaustion of touring. After spending years on the road with little privacy — sleeping alongside bandmates, living out of suitcases and navigating the peculiar intimacy of being a working musician — Martin began to understand solitude differently. Alone time became precious. The song turns that realization into something playful, folky and psychedelic, with Martin playing saxophone on a recording for the first time almost as a joke before deciding the sound was too good to remove.

This willingness to follow an idea wherever it leads is perhaps Brainstory’s defining characteristic. Their guiding question seems to be: What happens if we take what we love and push it somewhere unfamiliar? That impulse is present in Shoebox Days, a record made from old fragments but completed with new ears. It is a testament to growth, but also to the strange beauty of looking backward only long enough to move forward. The Shoebox is gone now. The cramped space, the stacks of equipment, and the years of experimentation have become memories. Yet their sounds remain. Brainstory has left the room, but they took the music with them.