Robber Robber are on the rise

Robber Robber, a quartet based out of Burlington, Vermont, make music that sounds bigger and grander than just the sum of its members, and as they chat about their second project, Two Wheels Move the Soul, they demonstrate how their tight operation can have more punch than an orchestra, as well as how their music jostles alongside the chaos in their personal lives. 

Speaking from a bedroom in Burlington, Nina Cates and Zack James, the core songwriters — Carney Hemler and Will Krulak are major contributors but absent from the call — come across as unassuming. Their music, however, is big and bold, serving up jagged post-punk rhythms and Strokes-inflected guitar tones that take big swings, as well as songwriting sensibilities that tend towards pop. All of this is bottled up within them, and spills out when it comes together in the studio. Nowhere was that more evident when they both had some issues with housing in early 2025. 

“We were couch surfing for like five months when that situation first started,” Cates explains, “but the songs for Two Wheels were pretty much already written by that point.” As one backup plan after another fell through, including a caved-in ceiling after a pipe burst, the only stable haven they had was making their music. “Making this album was the one normal thing we were doing,” James explains. “That was the thing that felt the most inevitable.” The pair are in agreement here – the music was there when they needed it – and perhaps the chaos around them meant that, as Cates says, “it was easy to remain really excited about going to the studio and making this album.” 

“The Sound That It Made”, the album’s lead single, drops you into the deep with frantic snares and heavily distorted guitars. It’s hard to put it into words, but it feels like watching that retro ‘You Wouldn’t Steal A Car…’ PSA from the aughts while there’s a blizzard swirling outside – as nostalgic as it is chaotic. This blend of energy is admittedly due in part to that instability we’d discussed. “It’s impossible to totally escape the outside forces in your life, you know,” Cates says. “It was already really chaotic and frenetic and unsteady, so that would definitely translate.” James continues: “We also made it in the dead of winter, when we were moving our shit around, stuck in the van during a snowstorm. So maybe it comes through as feeling like quite a cold album.” 

That said, the sonic changes since their last album, Wild Guess, aren’t only the result of the context in which they made each record. While it shares similar roots, Two Wheels is notably noisier, and thrashes around forcefully. 

“A lot of it was already there,” James explains, “There were a lot of little kernels of things that we liked from Wild Guess that I guess we just wanted to explore further here.” Cates zeroes in on tracks like “Sea Or War” and “Seven Houses” in illustrating this. You can hear it through the oppressive guitars or monotonous shuffle of the drums. “It’s like let’s pull the chorus of this song, and the riff from this song, and just keep pushing those ideas forward to see where it goes,” Cates says. They’re building out their sound in a considered, conscious way while trying to still “keep it all in the same world,” as James says. “Two Wheels is the most representative of where we are right now musically,” Cates continues, “but then we probably won’t make anything like it again; it’s always sort of a moving target to make music.”

How they choose what ideas to push forwards does seem like a fun crapshoot. The pair clearly love just messing around, picking up threads they left behind, and pulling on strings to see what the result looks like when it emerges. “We had a lot of fun with percussion and especially cymbals,” James says. “We did a bit of it on the last record, but here we tried different textures. In other words we hit some different bits of metal in some different ways.” Cates also brings up how they wanted to make their guitars sound worse. “I remember during the mixing of Wild Guess, we kept asking ourselves how do we make these guitars sound smaller, like a toy guitar. So for this one we just got a really practice amp, to make things sound stronky from the jump.” 

Though they half-joke about wanting their music to sound worse, the end result is assertive. “Avalanche Sound Effect” is tinny and tightly wound, with a guitar line reminiscent of early Dry Cleaning, and a vocal delivery that has the nonchalance of trap pioneer Gucci Mane. They both single it out as a track they really enjoyed recording. “All of the songs on this album came together differently, and with ‘Avalanche’ it was fun because it was really pieced together from a demo,” Cates explains. “It’s a deceptively hard song, so it was equally rewarding to hear it all come together.” 

With the core ideas from the demo, they jumped straight into the studio, giving themselves a hard deadline to have a song at the end of it. This pressure of time, and the logistical challenges of hiring a studio, comes through, where “Avalanche” feels spontaneous and alive, like they’re distilling the purest form of that original idea. This is perhaps the only proper rule that Robber Robber swears by when writing songs: it can’t feel stagnant. It must maintain that spark. As James puts it, they don’t want to feel like they’re “clocking in at the music factory.” 

Their deep fascination with keeping things alive pushed them into finding new and fun ways to play older things. “We’ll start off playing something digital, and then be like, can we make that with guitars?” Cates says. “That’s sort of how we ended up playing with a lot more prepared guitars on this record.” Even more impressive is that on an album that sounds at times synth-heavy, there aren’t any. “It’s something about my caveman musical sensibility where I love pulling up to gigs with just some guitars and amps and we can play out the whole set,” Cates explains. 

For James, this process they’ve stumbled into seems to run the other way, where they might start their demos sounding more digital, and slowly move the other direction. “How it gets more caveman and primitive as the idea develops further is super fun for us,” he says with a knowing smirk. It lends them a surprising amount of versatility, even if the framework seems rigid. 

And this flexibility lends itself suitably to being in snowy Burlington, a six-hour drive away from the brighter lights of New York City. “It’s been a really good place to be forced to learn what the booking process is like for DIY touring,” Cates says, “and it’s a super supportive community for music even though it’s smaller.” 

There may not be a distinct sound coming out of the New Englland town right now, as James explains, but all local acts foster a supportive community where they champion each other’s work and help each other out when someone drops out of a gig. “Even outside of music, like when we were struggling with housing, we always got taken care of,” James continues, “and we have a cat that’s a little difficult but someone would always offer to care for him for a bit.” He holds up the black mass of their cat Bonz just before he walks across their keyboard. 

Robber Robber are still a small band – they have no illusions about it – but they show on Two Wheels that their approach yields music that sounds huge, a testament to the niche pockets of the music world that interest them. If you’re into it, they’d love to have you come along.