Date Signed: October 2025
Label: Drag City
Type of Music: Folk, Jazz, Classical
Management: Self-managed
Booking: Black Rice Booking (Europe)
Publicity: Drag City
Web: coleberliner.com

After making his name as a member of the bands Kamikaze Palm Tree and Sharpie Smile, Cole Berliner has gone solo and The Black Door is his debut solo full-lengther. It also marks his debut for the Drag City Label, though it’s been a long time coming.

“I have been performing since I was a kid, through after school music programs and also through school,” Berliner says. “My first ever band performance that I can remember was in 2nd grade at my school talent show. We were called The Out of Control Fireball Psychics. Fast-forward, I began writing and playing in bands with friends as a high school teenager, and it was around this time that I started experimenting and recording songs and guitar pieces of my own. Around this time/post high school I actually had self-released a couple albums on Bandcamp under the moniker Tongue Splitter.”

The artist says that his sound is based on taking lots of different things and bringing them together. “My sound is kind of a result of this, an amalgamation of everything I’ve been a part of musically or listened to over the course of my life, trying to give each one it’s place in the music while still following the inner light of self-identity,” Berliner says.

“I think it’s also safe to say that I have always liked things with a bit of edge,” he continues. “Even if it’s meant to be soft and beautiful, there has to be some sort of hardness, imperfectness, or sadness.”

While The Black Door is Berliner’s solo debut for Drag City, he’s been working with the label since his band Sharpie Smile signed with them back in 2020.

“My bandmate Dylan and I had met Dan Koretzky in L.A. because we happened to be playing some west coast shows when he was in town,” he says. “Dylan and I both played in White Fence for a while, and I think Tim Presley was the one who connected the dots with us and Dan—Dan ended up coming to a pretty random but awesome show at a strip mall in Santa Ana, and we started talking after that.”

Berliner has had the songs from The Black Door kicking around for a while, but they came to life when he re-started playing them acoustically.

“Somehow, the steel string guitar shifted my perspective back to its original feeling from when I first started writing,” he says. “It was ‘winter’ in L.A., it was foggy and mysterious, lush-green and beautiful.”

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