ROMES

By Dylan Sheridan

I got on the horn with ROMES, a punktronic sibling duo based out of Toronto, Canada. The last time I saw ROMES was eight years ago on the Play Dead tour at the House of Blues Orlando. They were opening up for MUTEMATH. I sat down with them before that show for an interview. Only Nick was available out of the two brothers and before the band shifted gears to a different genre, they had other members in the group as well.

Now that it’s eight years later, I had the pleasure of reconnecting with Nick and Jake. We’re getting to see what has changed in the past decade and we talk about what they have been cooking up in the studio.

Dylan: Last time I saw you two was opening for Mutemath at the House of Blues in Orlando.

Nick: You look very familiar. I remember it well. Same band name, but essentially a different band.

Dylan: It’s kind of funny because you were a four-piece before right?

Nick: Yep. Now it’s just downsized to the two bros. It makes things a lot easier with just two guys, that’s for sure.

Dylan: Oh absolutely. Easier for collaborating, traveling, and touring. How was the tour you just got off of?

Nick: It was sweet. It was a bit of a whirlwind. It’s a weird feeling after you get back from a tour. Part of you is kind of like, “Did that actually just happen?”

Jake: It takes a while to adjust back to normal life and reality.

Nick: But it was sweet! The crowds were awesome. Really good crowds everywhere we went. A load of driving, obviously across the states. A lot different than Europe, but it was good.

Dylan: I’ve been really enjoying your new music and it’s cool to see you shift from indie rock to this ‘punktronic’ vibe. What made you shift gears from your original sound?

Nick: We grew up listening to a lot of electronic music. It was probably the music we listened to the most growing up. A couple of years ago we bought a couple analog synthesizers and we just started messing around with them. It rekindled our love for electronic music. Not that it ever fully went away. But it started inspiring a new way of creating music. We came from a rock background and that’s something we always wanted to keep on the record and live. Jake’s playing bass, we’re playing a live drum kit. So it brings a lot of electronic influence into the picture, but keeping that rawness and the grit from rock and punk.

Dylan: You popped back up on my socials a year ago or so. I saw you standing in a space surrounded by lights from what I remember. I thought about how cool and different it was for you guys. I hadn’t heard about your band in so long, so it was nice to see you pop back up in my feed.

Nick: We went to this studio in Toronto and rented these TVs. Put the visuals together for them and it was a way to create content for socials to promote the song.

Dylan: It’s cool to see how you evolved in music. Are you still using Ableton when you create music? Or are you using different DAWs?

Jake: Oh yea, we only use Ableton. That’s never gonna change.

Nick: It’s just the best because even for live we use Ableton because it’s so versatile. Maybe it’s just because it’s what we’ve learned, but we use it as a fully integrative DAW where we’re sending programming for all the lights on stage, we’re using it to convert MIDI signals so the drums can trigger the synth and lights live. We just found interesting ways to use it to get more done with a two-piece live.

Dylan: Let’s talk about your newest work, Sonic Trash. I feel like listening to just the first track, it grabs you by the collar and really throws you into the album. How much time did you put into this album and what was the process like?

Nick: Originally we weren’t trying to make an album. We were in this basement here messing around with different ideas. Really enjoying this love for sound design. Hooking gear up in weird ways to get crazy sounds.

Jake: Essentially just experimenting.

Nick: Yea, just experimenting. And the more we did it, the more we realized that some cool things were happening here with a cohesive sound. So we started fleshing some of those ideas out into songs and then we were like, “Oh shit. I guess we’ve got an album here. Might as well finish it up and put it together as such.”

Jake: We probably worked on it for a year or so.

Dylan: How did you feel like it translated live?

Jake: There was a lot of trial and error in the studio. We were figuring out how we were going to pull it off live. Initially I was playing guitar with the synth still. But we realized with the new sound it was too much. It didn’t really make sense. It was too noisy. Just too much going on, so I swapped with the bass guitar and it helped beef up the tracks.

Nick: I will say also, it’s definitely the most fun we’ve had performing our music live. Something about just the energy and everything with these songs. We were getting comments after a lot of the shows where people were kind of amazed that we were able to pull off this kind of big wall of sound and noise. Which was cool for us to hear because we put a lot of time and effort crafting the live set. The fact that people were telling us that it did translate was cool to hear.

Dylan: Did you have any memorable tour stops?

Nick: Europe is so cool, it’s the best. Seventeen cities we went to. Berlin stands out. It’s just a really cool city with really interesting and DIY pockets. The crowd was really sick there as well.

Jake: Copenhagen was cool except for the drunk guy that came on stage. In the middle of one of our songs he came up and we thought he was a sound tech trying to fix something.

Nick: We’re doing our own live remix of Beastie Boys’ “Intergalactic.” This guy comes on stage and initially he grabbed the drum overhead mic and started putting it into his mouth. We thought he was going to spit some Beastie Boys.

Jake: We realized he was drunk, so I went up to him and he was so angry. He took his jacket off and I thought he was about to punch me and he just gives me the finger on stage mid-song. And then finally someone came on and got him off.

Dylan: Those are some of the most fun tour moments though. They may be uncomfortable at first, but looking back they make for some of the most memorable stories to tell in the future. We missed you in Philly. We wish you were in Philadelphia.

Nick: We love Johnny Brenda’s there.

Dylan: Do you have any more future plans of touring as of now?

Nick: We just got booked to play a festival in Mexico City this summer. Which is sick because we’ve never played in Mexico before. And then we’re in the early stages of trying to get over to the UK later this year and then hopefully back to Europe in the spring. And then working on new music in the meantime.

Dylan: Already back to it!

Nick: There is a lot of downtime on tour. You’re always moving, you’re always doing something. Even if it’s driving to the next city. So then you get back home and you don’t have all of that going on. So for me personally, I feel like I just gotta get back into music because I feel like what am I doing? The plan is “I’m gonna decompress for a while when you get back home,” but then after a day or two you’re like, “I gotta do something now.”

Jake: Only took three or four days off. 

Dylan: Do you ever find yourself pulling samples from old demos at all?

Jake: It’s funny, we actually did that on the Sonic Trash album. For some of the songs we’d find old demos that didn’t make the cut for the album. We’d microsample our own music and place them in certain songs. I feel like we’ll probably end up doing that again in a different way.

Nick: It’s kind of fun doing that. Just finding obscure things from our own music that elevates another song of ours.

Dylan: When I was rediscovering your music recently I took notice that you had a song written for Call of Duty.

Nick: Yea, that was a song written specifically for Call Of Duty as opposed to one of our songs that found its way into it. The main composer of Black Ops soundtracks came across the stuff from our studio that we were posting on Instagram and thought that the sound would be a good fit for Call of Duty. So he DM’d us and said, “Hey, you wanna collab on the upcoming Black Ops 6?” And we were like, “Uh, yea. Let’s go!” And it was a fun process.

Dylan: Funny enough I have been replaying Black Ops 2 with a best friend of mine for his video game preservation channel on YouTube. I thought it was funny how serendipitous it was to get an interview with you both after playing that with him and seeing how you composed music for the new game.

Nick: I still feel like the consensus is that the Black Ops 2 theme song and multiplayer theme is right up there with the best of them.

Dylan: Iconic. When you were both younger did you play any video games together like Call of Duty or anything similar?

Jake: You liked Halo though I feel like.

Nick: Yea, but I spent way too much time on Donkey Kong Country and Mario Kart.

Jake: The Donkey Kong soundtrack is one of the best soundtracks ever. The water level. So good.

Dylan: When you were that age did those soundtracks inspire you? How old were you when you started to create music?

Nick: We started very young. I was like five, he was nine. We just started jamming noise together. And then our family moved to Ireland. They had a little coach house in the back that they turned into a little studio where we could jam. The whole big British indie invasion scene started happening when we moved over, so then we started learning and jamming covers of Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand and that sort of stuff. From there, our parents got a little 8-track mixer. We started writing our own demos and recording them.

Dylan: Hey, you might be able to sample those now.

Jake: That’d be insane.

Nick: I don’t know if I want to go back and listen to those. It’s been a journey playing in different bands over all these years. And this two-piece as ROMES started five years ago now, and everything before that led to this I guess.

Jake: It kind of went full circle.

Dylan: It’s crazy getting to talk to you both again. It’s been eight years and I’m glad to be able to reconnect with you once more. Hopefully we’ll see you back in the states at some point soon.

Nick: Hopefully see you at JB’s soon.

Eight years after first seeing ROMES live, it was refreshing to reconnect with Nick and Jake and see how much the project has evolved. From indie rock beginnings to the gritty electronic edge of Sonic Trash, the duo has carved out a sound that feels entirely their own. With new music in the works and more touring on the horizon, it feels like ROMES is only getting started on this next chapter.ROMES FINAL INTERVIEW

I got on the horn with ROMES, a punktronic sibling duo based out of Toronto, Canada. The last time I saw ROMES was eight years ago on the Play Dead tour at the House of Blues Orlando. They were opening up for MUTEMATH. I sat down with them before that show for an interview. Only Nick was available out of the two brothers and before the band shifted gears to a different genre, they had other members in the group as well.

Now that it’s eight years later, I had the pleasure of reconnecting with Nick and Jake. We’re getting to see what has changed in the past decade and we talk about what they have been cooking up in the studio.

Dylan: Last time I saw you two was opening for Mutemath at the House of Blues in Orlando.

Nick: You look very familiar. I remember it well. Same band name, but essentially a different band.

Dylan: It’s kind of funny because you were a four-piece before right?

Nick: Yep. Now it’s just downsized to the two bros. It makes things a lot easier with just two guys, that’s for sure.

Dylan: Oh absolutely. Easier for collaborating, traveling, and touring. How was the tour you just got off of?

Nick: It was sweet. It was a bit of a whirlwind. It’s a weird feeling after you get back from a tour. Part of you is kind of like, “Did that actually just happen?”

Jake: It takes a while to adjust back to normal life and reality.

Nick: But it was sweet! The crowds were awesome. Really good crowds everywhere we went. A load of driving, obviously across the states. A lot different than Europe, but it was good.

Dylan: I’ve been really enjoying your new music and it’s cool to see you shift from indie rock to this ‘punktronic’ vibe. What made you shift gears from your original sound?

Nick: We grew up listening to a lot of electronic music. It was probably the music we listened to the most growing up. A couple of years ago we bought a couple analog synthesizers and we just started messing around with them. It rekindled our love for electronic music. Not that it ever fully went away. But it started inspiring a new way of creating music. We came from a rock background and that’s something we always wanted to keep on the record and live. Jake’s playing bass, we’re playing a live drum kit. So it brings a lot of electronic influence into the picture, but keeping that rawness and the grit from rock and punk.

Dylan: You popped back up on my socials a year ago or so. I saw you standing in a space surrounded by lights from what I remember. I thought about how cool and different it was for you guys. I hadn’t heard about your band in so long, so it was nice to see you pop back up in my feed.

Nick: We went to this studio in Toronto and rented these TVs. Put the visuals together for them and it was a way to create content for socials to promote the song.

Dylan: It’s cool to see how you evolved in music. Are you still using Ableton when you create music? Or are you using different DAWs?

Jake: Oh yea, we only use Ableton. That’s never gonna change.

Nick: It’s just the best because even for live we use Ableton because it’s so versatile. Maybe it’s just because it’s what we’ve learned, but we use it as a fully integrative DAW where we’re sending programming for all the lights on stage, we’re using it to convert MIDI signals so the drums can trigger the synth and lights live. We just found interesting ways to use it to get more done with a two-piece live.

Dylan: Let’s talk about your newest work, Sonic Trash. I feel like listening to just the first track, it grabs you by the collar and really throws you into the album. How much time did you put into this album and what was the process like?

Nick: Originally we weren’t trying to make an album. We were in this basement here messing around with different ideas. Really enjoying this love for sound design. Hooking gear up in weird ways to get crazy sounds.

Jake: Essentially just experimenting.

Nick: Yea, just experimenting. And the more we did it, the more we realized that some cool things were happening here with a cohesive sound. So we started fleshing some of those ideas out into songs and then we were like, “Oh shit. I guess we’ve got an album here. Might as well finish it up and put it together as such.”

Jake: We probably worked on it for a year or so.

Dylan: How did you feel like it translated live?

Jake: There was a lot of trial and error in the studio. We were figuring out how we were going to pull it off live. Initially I was playing guitar with the synth still. But we realized with the new sound it was too much. It didn’t really make sense. It was too noisy. Just too much going on, so I swapped with the bass guitar and it helped beef up the tracks.

Nick: I will say also, it’s definitely the most fun we’ve had performing our music live. Something about just the energy and everything with these songs. We were getting comments after a lot of the shows where people were kind of amazed that we were able to pull off this kind of big wall of sound and noise. Which was cool for us to hear because we put a lot of time and effort crafting the live set. The fact that people were telling us that it did translate was cool to hear.

Dylan: Did you have any memorable tour stops?

Nick: Europe is so cool, it’s the best. Seventeen cities we went to. Berlin stands out. It’s just a really cool city with really interesting and DIY pockets. The crowd was really sick there as well.

Jake: Copenhagen was cool except for the drunk guy that came on stage. In the middle of one of our songs he came up and we thought he was a sound tech trying to fix something.

Nick: We’re doing our own live remix of Beastie Boys’ “Intergalactic.” This guy comes on stage and initially he grabbed the drum overhead mic and started putting it into his mouth. We thought he was going to spit some Beastie Boys.

Jake: We realized he was drunk, so I went up to him and he was so angry. He took his jacket off and I thought he was about to punch me and he just gives me the finger on stage mid-song. And then finally someone came on and got him off.

Dylan: Those are some of the most fun tour moments though. They may be uncomfortable at first, but looking back they make for some of the most memorable stories to tell in the future. We missed you in Philly. We wish you were in Philadelphia.

Nick: We love Johnny Brenda’s there.

Dylan: Do you have any more future plans of touring as of now?

Nick: We just got booked to play a festival in Mexico City this summer. Which is sick because we’ve never played in Mexico before. And then we’re in the early stages of trying to get over to the UK later this year and then hopefully back to Europe in the spring. And then working on new music in the meantime.

Dylan: Already back to it!

Nick: There is a lot of downtime on tour. You’re always moving, you’re always doing something. Even if it’s driving to the next city. So then you get back home and you don’t have all of that going on. So for me personally, I feel like I just gotta get back into music because I feel like what am I doing? The plan is “I’m gonna decompress for a while when you get back home,” but then after a day or two you’re like, “I gotta do something now.”

Jake: Only took three or four days off. 

Dylan: Do you ever find yourself pulling samples from old demos at all?

Jake: It’s funny, we actually did that on the Sonic Trash album. For some of the songs we’d find old demos that didn’t make the cut for the album. We’d microsample our own music and place them in certain songs. I feel like we’ll probably end up doing that again in a different way.

Nick: It’s kind of fun doing that. Just finding obscure things from our own music that elevates another song of ours.

Dylan: When I was rediscovering your music recently I took notice that you had a song written for Call of Duty.

Nick: Yea, that was a song written specifically for Call Of Duty as opposed to one of our songs that found its way into it. The main composer of Black Ops soundtracks came across the stuff from our studio that we were posting on Instagram and thought that the sound would be a good fit for Call of Duty. So he DM’d us and said, “Hey, you wanna collab on the upcoming Black Ops 6?” And we were like, “Uh, yea. Let’s go!” And it was a fun process.

Dylan: Funny enough I have been replaying Black Ops 2 with a best friend of mine for his video game preservation channel on YouTube. I thought it was funny how serendipitous it was to get an interview with you both after playing that with him and seeing how you composed music for the new game.

Nick: I still feel like the consensus is that the Black Ops 2 theme song and multiplayer theme is right up there with the best of them.

Dylan: Iconic. When you were both younger did you play any video games together like Call of Duty or anything similar?

Jake: You liked Halo though I feel like.

Nick: Yea, but I spent way too much time on Donkey Kong Country and Mario Kart.

Jake: The Donkey Kong soundtrack is one of the best soundtracks ever. The water level. So good.

Dylan: When you were that age did those soundtracks inspire you? How old were you when you started to create music?

Nick: We started very young. I was like five, he was nine. We just started jamming noise together. And then our family moved to Ireland. They had a little coach house in the back that they turned into a little studio where we could jam. The whole big British indie invasion scene started happening when we moved over, so then we started learning and jamming covers of Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand and that sort of stuff. From there, our parents got a little 8-track mixer. We started writing our own demos and recording them.

Dylan: Hey, you might be able to sample those now.

Jake: That’d be insane.

Nick: I don’t know if I want to go back and listen to those. It’s been a journey playing in different bands over all these years. And this two-piece as ROMES started five years ago now, and everything before that led to this I guess.

Jake: It kind of went full circle.

Dylan: It’s crazy getting to talk to you both again. It’s been eight years and I’m glad to be able to reconnect with you once more. Hopefully we’ll see you back in the states at some point soon.

Nick: Hopefully see you at JB’s soon.

Eight years after first seeing ROMES live, it was refreshing to reconnect with Nick and Jake and see how much the project has evolved. From indie rock beginnings to the gritty electronic edge of Sonic Trash, the duo has carved out a sound that feels entirely their own. With new music in the works and more touring on the horizon, it feels like ROMES is only getting started on this next chapter.