Something Specials release debut album "Somewhere Up There" after wildfire loss

Something Specials released its debut album, "Somewhere Up There," on Friday, roughly a year and a half after singer Taylor Olin lost her rented Altadena home to the Eaton fire, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Olin had moved from Echo Park to a rented camper on a ranch in Altadena in early January 2025, drawn to the area's artistic community. Within a week of settling in, she saw flames burning a nearby hillside and fled with only what she could carry; the camper survived only as a burned, twisted metal frame.

"Every successive update we would get from her was just unbelievably surreal," said bandmate Josh Augustin, who plays drums and keys and produces for the band. Olin couch-surfed and then slept in her van for weeks, waiting tables at a Sunset Boulevard oyster bar, before relocating first to Florida to hold a benefit show for fellow Altadena residents, and then to Europe with help from a friend's GoFundMe.

While Olin was displaced, the band's earlier song "Love," a folky, country-adjacent tune, began gaining traction on social media, turning up in thousands of Instagram Reels the band had no hand in choosing. "We had no idea where we were getting it from," Olin said. Guitarist and bassist Nathan Slone said the group's whole catalog seemed to be in a "high tide lifts all ships" moment; the song has grown from about 1 million Spotify listeners to nearly 20 million, with the band's average monthly listeners now at 1.2 million.

The trio, completed by Slone in New York, has met in person only three times, including the night Olin and Slone first shook hands onstage at the Echoplex before the band's debut show. Their remote workflow, passing stems back and forth for each member to add parts before mixing and mastering, is unusual only in how little in-person contact it requires. "We need each other all the way through, we each bring a different thing to the project," Slone said.

Unsigned and without representation, the band plans to keep its DIY approach even as labels have circled. "We do pretty darn well on our own, and record labels don't really have much to offer us, frankly," Slone said. Olin said working outside the industry felt right at a moment when artificial intelligence looms over creative work, and the band is pressing an initial run of about 500 vinyl copies of the album, with CD and cassette editions planned later.

The band plays New York's Sultan Room on October 28. MusicSuey tracks the album alongside other new indie and rock releases on the release calendar.