FIRST PRESS

Most second albums get written in a rehearsal room. Robber Robber wrote theirs while they had no fixed address. In the winter of 2024 into 2025, a fire tore through the Burlington, Vermont apartment building where singer-guitarist Nina Cates and drummer Zack James lived. Their unit was spared, but the building was condemned and everyone in it was displaced, Pitchfork reported. Their label, Fire Talk, says the landlord then moved to have the building demolished. For months the pair slept on the couches of fellow Vermont musicians, among them Greg Freeman, Lily Seabird and Thus Love's Echo Mars, per Stereogum.

The record that came out of that stretch, Two Wheels Move the Soul, arrived on April 3 via Fire Talk. It is the reason a band that was self-releasing its music two years ago spent September opening for Modest Mouse.

From Brattleboro to the best-of lists

Cates and James grew up in Brattleboro, where they played in a teen rock band called the Snaz, then moved to Burlington for the University of Vermont in 2019, Seven Days reported. Guitarist Will Krulak and bassist Carney Hemler complete the lineup.

Their debut, Wild Guess, was self-released in 2024 and still made noise well beyond Vermont. Stereogum put the band at No. 10 on its 40 Best New Artists of 2024, calling the album "truly a wild card," and Pitchfork included it among its best rock albums of that year, as Fire Talk notes. Fire Talk signed them and released "Talkback," a quick, wiry song about thinking of the perfect comeback hours too late.

What the new record sounds like

Two Wheels Move the Soul does not narrate the fire. Cates built the lyrics as what she calls a "collection collage," pieced together from journal entries and memories from the months after, according to Pitchfork's review, which scored the album 7.8. The detail is scattered on purpose: weather reports, sports radio, a takeout bag, all the static of a life with no routine.

The music is just as restless:

• "The Sound It Made" opens on James playing something close to drum 'n' bass, with Hemler's bass dragging behind like a delayed reaction.
• "Pieces" lets Krulak's guitar ring clean in the verses, then collapses into noise rock at the chorus.
• "Avalanche Sound Effect" starts as a ringing drone and ends in a pileup of crossing guitars.
• "Watch for Infection" puts jazzy drumming under fuzzed-out bass, released ahead of the album as a single.

Seven Days heard '90s alt-rock in "Talkback" and UK grime rhythms in "The Sound It Made," and noted that the songs rarely keep a standard verse-chorus-bridge shape. The band recorded again with engineer Benny Yurco, who worked on parts of Wild Guess. Where the debut came at you with hooks, Pitchfork wrote, the new one handles its chaos with "a controlled burn." The noise is still there. It just feels like shelter now instead of a threat.

The road

The touring matches the reviews. Fire Talk announced in September that Robber Robber were opening a run of Modest Mouse dates, including the St. Augustine Amphitheatre during Florida's Sing Out Loud festival. Europe and the UK follow in late October and early November, then East Coast dates supporting Greg Freeman, one of the friends whose couch they slept on.

A band that loses its home and answers with its most patient, best-built record is worth following closely. Robber Robber treat genre as raw material and chaos as something to steer. In a year crowded with guitar records, theirs is the one that sounds like a place.