If you’ve followed these pages over the years, you already know Record Store Day is every damn day, and Brooklyn’s selection of record shops is so extensive it is effectively unmatched. But some of those excavation sites require a bit more digging than others to unearth, which is a loving labor, honestly, not entirely unlike the art of crate-crashing itself.
So for this year’s run at the stacks, we’re aiding your pursuit of those gorgeous, glossy acetates by pointing you toward some of the spots keeping low profiles and well-stocked inventory. Some present as barbershops, natural wine bars, salons, or high-end apartments. But all are easily amongst the best record shops currently in Brooklyn—the type you’d be perfectly justified to gatekeep protect from unseasoned selectors.
Below you’ll find a handful of Brooklyn record stores you might have missed at first pass. But they’re like any good, great, or grail album. Once you finally lock-in, a new foil is revealed with every subsequent rotation.
Photo by Michael Gonik
Radio
1136 President St.
Opening its doors in Summer 2024, Radio is one the newest additions to the borough’s still robust record exchange. More than a side-car to neighboring natural wine bar Rodeo, it’s quaint in the way you might hear a broker describe an apartment with sub-optimal square footage. But what Radio lacks in size is made up ten-fold by the curation of its crates, which cover a ton of sonic ground—everything from regional and imported disco singles to samba suites, Motown (and adjacent) soul, and a tidy, but wildly tempting selection of dance hall, zouk, and African highlife. It’s not the type of spot you’ll spend a day in, but, paired with a glass (or three) of orange wine from next door and maybe a few songs from whoever’s spinning in the conjoining custom-build sound room between their spaces, you might just spend a night there.
Photo by Michael Gonik
Buzzed Monkey Records
88 S. Portland Ave.
Another space that splits the floorplan with a neighbor, Buzzed Monkey is the new fade on the now-shuddered Headsounds Records. It’s located on the other side of a unit shared with the Persons of Interest barbershop, where clients can presumably comb the stacks while waiting for a chair to open up (a great reason to pull up a little early for your next cut). The shop is owned and run by retired photojournalist and longtime DJ Robbie Busch, who stocked the store’s walls and aisles with picks from an impressive private collection—featuring Prestige jazz releases, cosmic funk classics, some rap rarities, and plenty more—amassed over almost 40 years of spinning nightly across the boroughs.
Courtesy of African Record Centre
African Record Centre
1194 Nostrand Ave.
Not many record stores in the city—or even the country—can claim to be singlehandedly responsible for delivering whole continents of musical output to stateside audiences. But Flatbush’s longstanding and legendary African Record Centre is one of those few. Established in 1969 by the Francis Brothers—one of which, Roger, still looks after the shop to this day— the ARC was the first importer of pioneering African funk icons like Fela Kuti and Manu Dibango. Though you probably won’t come across too many copies of their albums in the shop these days, the ARC remains in its original Nostrand Ave. location, a fixture of the neighborhood and a must-see-to-believe archive on any collector or casual hobbyist’s search for African obscurities in the borough.
Photo by Michael Gonik
Blue-Sun Records
400 South 2nd. St.
After spending several years tucked under the BQE in South Williamsburg, Blue-Sun Records has expanded and moved its impeccably well-rounded operation to a retail unit stashed on the ground floor of a residential building on South 2nd Street. The nondescript shop with towering ceilings and no signage might get mistaken for a high-end apartment at first glance, but you should feel no reservations about getting too close to its stock. They keep the space tidy, fragrant (thanks to an ample selection of imported Kuumba incense) and well-organized—new arrivals to the front, a mid-section stuffed to the gills, alphabetized by genre, and a whole wall of assorted 45s to the back. Whether you arrive by accident or by way of a very intentional mission, you’ll leave with a mountain of heat in hand.
Face Records
176 Borinquen Pl.
Along the stretch of Grand Street that briefly becomes Borinquen Place in South Williamsburg, you’ll find what is objectively the city’s largest accumulation of Japanese wax in what may be its smallest record shop by the square foot. Nestled between a beauty shop and an apartment building, the good folks at Face Records have been luring decorated and novice collectors to their corner of Brooklyn since 2017. They specialize in all things City Pop, fusion, funk, and even library, but also the far less obscure. If you ever had the itch for a Japanese pressing of the Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready To Die or, say, Metallica’s self-titled album, this would be your source.
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