After several tours incorporating members Kristina Lieberson (keyboards) and Jen Turner (bass), the band signed as a five-piece to Secretly Canadian in September 2009.

[11] The band performed at the SXSW festival in 2009 and again in March 2010,[9] and completed tours of North America with White Rabbits[12] and of Europe with the New Pornographers.

In the months leading up to The January EP, Here We Go Magic played a few shows around North America, including sets at Coachella and Wilco's Solid Sound Festival.

Slant Magazine called the record a "synthy, dreamy album captured a rich sound with very little bluster, effectively lulling and beguiling listeners with quiet, acoustic-driven psychedelia".

The Skinny stated that, while "Here We Go Magic's line-up may have undergone a significant reshuffle since the release of 2012's acclaimed A Different Ship, frontman Luke Temple has managed to retain a similar auricular template with Be Small.

[25] The first album has been described as "stream-of-conscious lyrics and swirls of psychedelic, lo-fi noise",[26] and "insistently repetitive grooves and densely layered loops".

Club, saw it as an album of two distinct sides, "one full of hummable, groove-inflected bedroom folk, and the other populated by cascading waves of ambient white noise".

[29] Tim DiGravina, reviewing the album for Allmusic described it as "everything but the kitchen sink, stream of conscious composition...taking on a couple different and somewhat incongruous genres, from Afro-beat pop to freak folk to outright noise collages".

[31] Allmusic writer Jason Thurston described the band's sound as an "ethereal collage of indie folk, Baroque pop, plains country (and whatever else strikes their fancy)".