On the Rise
Run Remedy

Her artist moniker, for instance – Run Remedy – is two words which together you could endlessly read into, and her debut record’s title, Xtian Skate Night, takes me a good few minutes to read correctly as “Christian Skate Night.”

“You got it right!” Koob laughs, calling from a Premier Inn hotel in East London, where she’s attending South by Southwest Festival with her mainstay guitarist. “Everyone’s like ‘What? X?’ And I say, ‘Yeah! Like Xmas, or Xtreme.’ It’s very much a reference to early 2000s teenagerhood.”

Born in the US but now based in Manchester, Koob has called many countries home, including China, South Korea, Japan, and Germany. However, unlike what you might expect from such a well-travelled artist, Xtian Skate Night isn’t a Kerouac-tinged paean to travel, but instead a small-scale homage to her teenage years – a queer coming-of-age story set in ultra-Christian New Jersey.

The title track is about a very specific “Christian Skate Night” – Koob’s first step into realising her sexuality. Inevitably, that caused friction with the not-exactly-queer-friendly environment she’d grown up in.

“Each song represents a moment from age 13, when I had my realisation moment,” Koob shares. “I’m at the roller skating rink like, ‘Why do I only want to hold hands with girls?’ There’s an acoustic one, which I recorded in my bedroom: that’s me saying goodbye to my mom, when I left to get self-guardianship. Others, like ‘For Jo’, don’t necessarily have a chronological time. They’re just moments that have a strong memory, or a lesson to be learned. It’s a remedy, right? It’s my musical therapy that I’ve written years later.”

Outside of the lyrics, the album’s instrumentation – painted on a deceptively simple indie folk canvas – has plenty to dig into: free-flowing guitar patterns, touches of cloudy synth, strident, sometimes Springsteen-esque drums, and Koob’s low, resonant singing. It’s all pure, blissful, lo-fi dreaminess.

There’s also a decent amount of violin: Koob’s main instrument, which over the years she’s played in unexpected contexts. A memorable one, she tells me, was becoming a regular performer in a Chinese jazz club.

“I ended up doing some really funny Mandarin translations of classic pop songs – the one that everyone loved most was Daniel Johnston’s ‘True Love Will Find You in The End’,” Koob remembers. “I still occasionally sing that in Mandarin to my friends – that was pretty funny. I also got roped into loads of country fiddle stuff, and black metal projects, because I play my violin through a series of pedals and make it sound really wacky when I want to.”

That black metal period came later, after Robin moved with her partner from Germany to the UK, settling in Manchester. The city’s music community very soon became creatively and personally inspiring for her.

“I love the music community in Manchester. There’s no gatekeeping, really, that I’ve experienced. If I have a good promoter, I’m going to share it with all my friends. If there’s a good venue, I’m going to tell everybody about it. We all create a happy and healthy ecosystem where we rise together. I mean, maybe that’s my idealistic American viewpoint, but that’s what it seems like to me!”

So why did a musician with such an eclectic resumé land on indie folk as a framework and not, say, more black metal? Well, it’s all to do with the way the artists she loves – like Sufjan Stevens and Elliott Smith – place lyrics at the forefront of their songs.

“My music has a lot of puns, not just in the lyrics but the music, too, and lots of sonic inside jokes,” she says. “I think that for people who write in these heavily textured, sonically quirky ways – we want people to be able to listen to the song and catch something on the second listen that they didn’t on the first. It’s a constant struggle between complexity and accessibility.”

Koob’s first solo songs only started to take shape when she had to fly from the UK back to the US to take care of her mother, who was in hospice care. Once she arrived, her mother was convinced that it was high time for Koob to write her own songs.

“I was like, ‘Well, mom, if I do my own, I’m going to tuck into some of this drama from when I was a teenager, and things were hard in the family – the Christianity – we hadn’t made peace with a lot of stuff’,” Koob says, adding, “and she said, ‘Ugh, I’ll be dead, go for it’, which is dark but hilarious, which is my mom and also my humour.”

Time spent with her mother, Koob says, was the conduit for many of the album’s lyrics – a full-circle moment of returning to that ultra-religious environment that had hindered her self-discovery. The result, Xtian Skate Night, is a very special project – the story of an artist who, for a while, ran from her adolescent demons, before finding a remedy in returning home to make quiet peace with them.

“When she passed away, I came back to the UK – that’s when I kind of had permission from her to start broaching those topics,” Koob concludes. “And that’s when all the writing came out.”