NYC, Hell 3:00 AM

NYC, Hell 3:00 AM is a studio album by American musician James Ferraro, released digitally and physically on October 15, 2013 by the label Hippos in Tanks. The album, stylistically exploring a combination of R&B and avant-garde music, was Ferraro's first album recorded with studio instrumentation. It began as a conceptual project, described by Ferraro as "a surreal psychological sculpture of American decay and confusion", for him to only record at or around midnight, and the album's material was "realized" instead of structured and planned out.

NYC, Hell 3:00 AM explores themes of decadent aspects of life in New York City that are otherwise not propagated to the rest of the world, but is also "a statement about [Ferraro's] emotional hell", and it is "about [his] demons just as much as it's about society's demons". Its sound palette incorporates "monastic" instrumentation including moody string sections, glockenspiels and bells, as well as samples from news broadcasts, heavily processed and distorted sound design, text-to-speech voices, and what reviewer Reed Scott Reid writing for Tiny Mix Tapes described as "non-sequitur streetlife collage". It also incorporates Ferraro's own singing voice and ambiguous mumbled lyrics with a somber presentation. Music journalists wrote favorable reviews of NYC, Hell 3:00 AM upon its release, and the album appeared on year-end lists of publications such as Vice magazine, Chart Attack and The Wire; common major praises were toward its unique concept and the way it presented it, while more mixed reviews criticized the overall presentation, the off-kilter sound palette, and the quality of Ferraro's singing.