Upper East Siders who want to spend an afternoon flipping through crates have long had to get on a train first. That’s no longer the case. A record store with a devoted following among New York collectors has opened a second location in the neighborhood.
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Human Head Records is open at 455 E. 83rd St., between First and York avenues, from noon to 8 p.m. daily. The store opened the space on Aug. 1 and has been running seven days a week since.The Brooklyn original opened in 2013 on Johnson Avenue, launched by Travis Klein and Steve Smith. Klein, who had been selling off his own collection online after losing a job, told Bushwick Daily at the time that the idea was to stock the classics that collectors kept striking out on. “It was always hard for me to find the classic essential records from all the great bands,” he said. The store later moved to a larger space at 289 Meserole St. in East Williamsburg, where it still operates.
In the years since, it’s become one of the more widely recommended shops in the city. Time Out has called it the best-priced and least picked-over record store in New York, singling out the cheap bins as worth a dig. Klein described his approach to In Sheep’s Clothing in 2024 as volume-based, an idea he said he carried over from an earlier career in the beverage industry, and said he’d get on a plane for a collection if one were big enough.
The inventory skews toward secondhand and covers most of what you’d expect from a New York shop, including rock, soul and disco, jazz, Latin, rap and house. The store also brings in Brazilian and African records in quantity.
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