Written by One week after moving into a new apartment, I was cooking dinner when the unit’s fuse box abruptly burst into flames. I ran around the apartment alerting my roommates and looking for a fire extinguisher but returned empty-handed, an oversight by the landlord that turned my spine cold. One roommate called the fire department, others shoved belongings into backpacks, and I alerted our neighbors: a single father with kids upstairs, a reclusive woman below, strangers I’d never even passed in the stairwell. As residents escaped, I grabbed a broom that had caught fire and whacked it against the floor until the embers went out, threw every object within the fuse box’s radius into the opposite room, and ran.
Your priorities come into focus fast when there’s a fire you can’t control. If you’re lucky, time is on your side and nobody is harmed. It was for me and it was for Robber Robber: a fire ripped through the Vermont band’s apartment complex in Burlington last winter. Their unit was the only one spared, its interior still intact like a Thorne miniature room on charred stilts, but the landlord condemned the building and its residents were displaced. For months, Robber Robber crashed on the couches of friends and fellow artists, including Greg Freeman and Lily Seabird, before eventually climbing into an unused attic for temporary shelter. They had just begun working on their second album, Two Wheels Move the Soul, before the catastrophe took place, so they posted up permanently inside their own music—one of the few things within their control.
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“The Sound It Made” opens Two Wheels Move the Soul like the blaze is roaring to life before your eyes. Zack James’ shifty drumming hammers out a drum ’n’ bass redux like a panicked heartbeat while Carney Hemler’s bass lurches in slow motion, replicating the gut drop of a horrible realization. Singer-guitarist Nina Cates pieced together the lyrics in what she calls a “collection collage,” pulling from memories and journal entries she wrote during the period after the fire. Seemingly detached observations on weather and people-watching are flanked by an assortment of entities—sports radio, a smiley-face takeout bag, the trolley problem—that seem random until you realize the chaos is the point. “I don’t wanna get stuck like this,” repeats Cates, yearning for routine and calm.
Robber Robber don’t relive their apartment fire in literal terms on the album or dramatize the months spent living out of suitcases. Instead, they fill their songs with more oblique references to support systems, trash and grime, the insatiable need for stability—processing how class and community inform the experience of displacement. Gratitude for having a place to close your eyes doesn’t erase the loneliness of nomadic living. It’s especially true in Vermont, where wealth disparities separate generational blue-collar families from the snow bunnies and post-pandemic homeowners chasing the state’s idyllic stereotype in the face of a homelessness crisis. Rearrange her lyrics and Cates’ intentionally fractured scenes clearly flit between the trepidation, despair, and resigned acceptance familiar to certain locals.
On “Pieces,” Robber Robber try adjusting to a life that’s falling apart. Guitarist Will Krulak lets a psych-rock line ring out in the verses like the beam of a flashlight in apprehensive hands, before letting it fall to the floor in the chorus at a wall of noise rock. “There isn’t light to see/We’ll navigate by touch,” sings Cates. The discordant ringing that starts “Avalanche Sound Effect” gets whipped into a frenzy by its halfway point, the song’s crisscrossing guitars akin to those of late-era Palm. Cates’ falsettos chime from above like a guardian angel gifting advice, even if she’s actually spiraling out about upended time. Whenever Robber Robber merge incongruous textures, like the jazzy drumming and fuzzed-out bass of “Watch for Infection,” it induces a dizzying effect, like you’re awake under anesthesia during a surgery and can hear every squish.
For Two Wheels Move the Soul, Robber Robber reunited with Benny Yurco, the engineer behind portions of their debut album, Wild Guess. This time around, his recording studio morphed from a playground into a haven, its familiar walls allowing the type of creativity that only flourishes in private spaces—a luxury for the band at that time. What’s more, it felt like home. Where their debut roars, jabbing with hooks, Two Wheels Move the Soul instead inverts the noise until the sound becomes pillowy and comforting. This time they’re turning abrasive guitar chords and the dim roar of shoegaze feedback into weighted blankets that salve. The cacophony is consistent, but Robber Robber prove they know how to navigate it with a controlled burn.
