Roomer are on the rise

They started making experimental, electronic-leaning music together across a few different bands. At the same time, Aron was working with Ronja Schößler as a duo. “I guess at some point we just decided to come together and make a band,” he says, “because it was kind of overdue.”

Rather than a conscious commitment, Roomer’s DIY ethic emerged from working with whatever resources were available to them at the time. Their first EP, Skize (2022), was recorded as a way of “collecting the music in some way,” as vocalist Schößler recalls. Its sound was reminiscent of bands like Alvvays – comfortably within that post-Covid dream-pop revival – yet it still contained traces of the members’ experimental backgrounds, with a slower, denser, and more ambient turn on songs like “Dust” and “Lips”. “The core of our music is still this DIY feeling,” she says, “of just trying to keep the first take we recorded.”

This spirit also stretches past the recording process to the other creative parts that go into making a record. “We’re really eager to try things ourselves, and we enjoy all of these steps,” Wandinger, the producer and drummer, explains. “We have different talents that aren’t just music,” Aron adds, “so we can bring everything into the band.” Beyond the fact that Wandinger is also a visual artist, the band have historically taken their own promo photos and designed their record covers themselves, though they conceded to collab with the graphic designer from their current label for this cover and worked with the acclaimed German-Chinese photographer Prissilya Junewin for this cycle. 

While the band's first EP was self-released, in 2025, they signed with Munich-based Squama, run by producer Martin Brugger and creative director Maximilian Schachtner. Their relationship to the label stems from the friendship Wandinger shared with Brugger, the two meeting over Facebook and bonding over early jazz reissues. “He showed a lot of interest in Roomer’s music really early on,” Wandinger recalls. 

Brugger was involved in the recording of the band’s latest album, Staircase Made of Rope, a record that sounds blurry in the layering of some of its songs, like a worn-out analogue snapshot, its colours dulled to a dusty, desaturated haze. Songs like “Untitled” are almost whispered, laced with flashes of metallic sound. Others, like “Grey”, sound as if they were recorded in a huge, high-ceilinged room, eavesdropped from the other side of a wall. Such textures sit alongside more pop-leaning songs, such as “For Yves”, which is cleaner in production and built around a hooky pre-chorus reminiscent of early Wolf Alice. 

“That was really nice, having someone at the desk doing the hard work, so we could focus on playing and having ideas,” Schößler says. The band produced the record together, with Wandinger handling mixing and post-production, though pinning down who did what proves tricky. “It gets a bit strange to name it,” Wandinger admits. “But Martin was just there, setting a really good atmosphere. Whatever weird idea we wanted to try, he’d always say, ‘Let’s do it.’”

The process itself was a departure from their debut. “The last record was a very slow, sometimes painful process,” Aron says. This time the album came a lot more quickly, through first takes and improvisation, and what began as an invitation turned into an album almost by accident. “Martin had invited us to Munich to just come by and record,” Wandinger says. The session went so well they booked a second. “We realised, oh shit, we kind of have a second album now.”

This being said, when shaping the material in the studio, not every song was created through the same approach. “They came into the world in different ways,” Schößler says. The clearest case is “Grey”, the album cycle’s second single. Schößler demoed it alone at home, and when the band later tried to rebuild it together in the studio, it just didn’t come together. They kept the demo as the final track.

The band treats these decisions as proof of how they work. “All three of us are very open to how a song can sound, and we don’t think in genre,” Schößler says. “It’s always the mixture of the three of us and the song, thinking about what it needs.” Wandinger puts it more simply: “I think of the album as a family with a lot of different kids. They all stem from us, but they’re all very different. One is very, very bright and the other one is very dark, but together they might have joy together. I think we thought it would be cool to let every song really get its own personality and not try to just squeeze this ‘band sound’ onto each track. Every song was really allowed to really open up in its own direction.” 

Similarly, the band’s lyrics don’t follow a certain objective or set idea. “A lot of the words that I used for the new album came from dreams that I had,” Schößler – who writes most of the lyrics – tells me. “It’s not like I’m telling a very clear story from beginning to end. When I use words I want the person listening to feel some kind of connection.” This is seconded by Wandinger: “I absorb the lyrics subconsciously, only fully grasping them after we’ve played a song 20 times, which is amazing, because the songs keep revealing things to me.”

Curiously, one of the artistic outputs tied to the project happens to be a perfume, something that can end up smelling different from one skin to another. Aron has been making perfumes to go with the band’s records since their previous LP, Leaving It All to Chance (2025). “For the last record, I think the inspiration for the smell was kind of mixed between a musky, mouldy rehearsal space and a forest walk, because I feel those were maybe the two places we worked in mostly. I think now it’s going to be a little bit brighter, a bit more floral,” Aron says. “And more green!”, Schößler shouts.