Nina Cates and Zack James started playing music together as teenagers, but it wasn’t until they finished high school that they began writing songs together. Having both moved to Burlington to attend the University of Vermont, they put out a couple of EPs before landing on the name Robber Robber and adding Will Krulak on guitar and Carney Hemler on bass. Cates handles vocals and rhythm guitar, while James plays drums; as a duo, they co-produced the band’s debut album, Wild Guess, out Friday, working with engineers Benny Yurco (Grace Potter) and Urian Hackney (Iggy Pop, Rough Francis). Dizzying and delightful in equal measure, the record is an exercise in making the listener lean in and throwing you off, holding little back in its barrage of instrumentation while gracefully moving between post-punk, krautrock, and even shoegaze. Even when the music seems on the verge of collapsing in on itself, the group remains perfectly locked in, making the social chaos the lyrics often revolve around feel perfectly human. And though you won’t be able to make out a clear story, you’ll want to hear how it all plays out.
We caught up with Robber Robber’s Nina Cates and Zack James for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about the origins of the band, co-producing their debut album, its lyrical themes, and more.
You started playing together when you were kids. What are your memories of that time?
Zack James: Yeah, we were in a band together all throughout high school, and for me, even before I was in high school.
Nina Cates: When I met Zack – you can’t tell how tall he is now, but he’s taller than me – I was taller than him. He hadn’t quite hit puberty yet. I joined the band he was already in, and I think we played our first live show like 10 years ago in February of this year. We’ve played in a lot of bands over the years, but usually he’s on drums and I’m on bass. We’ve had a lot of time to gel and listen to each other as the rhythm section; in a band, I feel like it’s really important to be locked in with the other member of that section.
ZJ: We had a lot of time to just play music together, be musicians together, and play shows before we even thought about sharing any sort of creative ambitions. By the time we were writing music together, we already had this other aspect pretty much dialed in, which is cool. We’ve been trying to figure out how to grow as collaborators, which has been a lot easier having already gotten really good at touring and playing together for so many years.
How naturally did writing together come for you? Was it something you both dabbled in separately?
ZJ: Definitely something we dabbled in separately before joining forces on that. But also, not even that much; we were still trying to figure out how to make music and were sort of doing that together.
NC: We collaborate in a lot of different areas, but still one of the hardest things we do is writing a new song together and being able to tell each other, “Hey, that’s not the vision or the vibe,” while giving each other’s ideas enough space to breathe, even if they don’t immediately click with you. It’s definitely a balancing act we have to navigate every time. And I think overall, we are getting better at it. We’ve been writing since we had Wild Guess done, and it’s getting a little more streamlined, but it’s always going to be a lot of work.
ZJ: I think we’re pretty good at it, but we’re always trying to get better and find different ways of doing it.
Are you always working toward it being more streamlined, or is the challenging aspect of it crucial to you?
NC: I kinda never want it to be too easy.
ZJ: Yeah. We’ve made songs in so many ways that if we wanted to settle on a streamlined process, we could have several times by now. But we’re more interested in just seeing what happens if we try out different stuff.
NC: I feel like our process is very curious a lot of the time, and that’s what keeps it fun to come back and write new stuff.
It’s been half a decade since you put out the Guy Ferrari EP, which at the time was self-titled. How do you feel like your process, both individually and as collaborators, has evolved since then?
NC: It’s funny, we were writing the Guy Ferrari EP together before we even went off to college. That was really just testing the waters of: Can write together? do we like the type of music we wind up with when we write together? Is it something we would ever want to keep doing? I think I’ve grown a lot as a songwriter since then. I feel like with the new music, we’re able to more fully translate an interesting image. That earlier stuff was a lot more straightforward, just getting the song done; I still like elements of those songs, but I feel we’ve grown a lot since then.
ZJ: I don’t know how common this is for bands, but the first couple of EPs felt more like an exercise or a learning experience. There definitely was a moment, years after we started the project, when we decided to book more shows and take the band more seriously. We said to ourselves, “Okay, if we’re going to actually put time into this project, we should try to make more inspired music.” The first two EPs were just us going crazy.
NC: Those were just made in Zack’s basement, and we just threw it up on Bandcamp. This time, I feel like we’ve given it time to develop, and with that, we want to give it a proper send-out.
I’m curious about your approach to co-producing the record, starting with ‘Seven Houses’, which condenses the rhythm and chaos of the album into a relatively short track. The drums play an interesting role, where they’re sort of feeding into the background noise rather than propelling it, except when they cut through the refrain. What was the thinking behind it?
ZJ: That’s one of our favorite songs on the record.
NC: The whole song is sort of a crescendo, and when we were thinking about it, I really liked the idea that there’s anticipation involved with that; you expect some or release in tension or change, and it’s kind of unrelenting. That was interesting to play out with. Also, with that concept, it would have been exhausting to make the song much longer. But I love the energy it brings to the record.
ZJ: We were thinking about, like, when a CD starts skipping; we were thinking of a song that sounds like that, the same half-second getting repeated. The guitars are doing really simple stuff with the same four chords the whole time, but the bass plays more off of the vocals and introduces different notes as the root note. The vocals and the bass are kind of dancing together.
What were the pressures of going into the studio without necessarily having a fully-fleshed idea of a song?
NC: We were really lucky. We worked with Benny Yurco in Burlington, as well as our friend Urian Hackney, and both of them have studios. Urian is an incredible drummer; he’s been playing with the Armed and Iggy Pop. We knew, with some of the more drum-forward songs and things that we wanted to be loud and rambunctious, we wanted to try and go into Urian’s to do those just because the sound of that studio would capture it well and be interesting on the record. And then with Benny, he’s a good friend of ours. We hang out in the studio a fair amount, just to hang out with him, but also Zack does a lot of drum work for other local people who are coming into the studio. So we’re really comfortable there, and we’ve spent a lot of time just relaxed there, so that helped us being like, “We’re gonna go in, and the goal is to record today.” But he’s great at creating an environment where you’re not like, “Oh my God, I’m on the clock right now.” The songs that we did there with just the two of us felt like we could be a lot more experimental with them. It’s cool that we were able to test out both styles on the record.
Thematically, the album partly revolves around scrambling for connection or finding the words to express yourself. Do you feel like there’s a sense of progression there, from songs like ‘Mouth’ and ‘Backup Plan’ to ‘Dial Tone’ and ‘Machine Wall’, even if it wasn’t chronologically how you wrote them?
NC: Yeah, it’s interesting. A while ago, I was writing out the lyrics for all of the tracks, and I realized throughout the record that the songs that have fewer words, we wound up putting earlier on the album, and then the songs that are a lot more wordy, we wound up putting later on. It’s kind of like I’m warming up my voice and my ability to actually reflect on things. I do feel like missed connections and just struggling to connect is definitely a thematic piece of the whole record, and it’s just something that I think about a lot, maybe just at this age, with going out and building up careers and networking – it all has to do with expressing yourself properly.
Do you feel like that struggle being at the core of the songs makes them tricky to talk about within the band?
NC: It’s funny. Whenever I’m writing lyrics, I write a lot and then take them to the band, and I’m like, “What do you think about this? How about that one? Is this one cool?” [laughs] And they’re all like, “Oh, yeah, those are fine.” But I don’t usually come to the group like, “This one’s about struggling to connect within nightlife.” Each song has a meaning at the core, but they’re also kind of collage-like. I find it hard to write in a linear way, focusing on one idea for a whole song, so there are a lot of different things people can connect to.
ZJ: You do a good job of thinking about the character of the song, and I think that’s something we think about a lot when we’re writing a song or lyrics to go with some instrumental part.
NC: I think a lot about the sound of the words, too, as they fit in; the words as another instrument.
Is that kind of lyrical filtering something that mostly happens when you’re bringing the song into a collaborative or communal space?
ZJ: One thing I admire about Nina is that she’ll show lyrics to anyone who will listen.
NC: That’s not always true. [laughs] To people who are good lyricists that will listen.
ZJ: You have a broader network of songwriting confidants than most other songwriters I know. Most people I know, no one can tell them shit about their lyrics.
NC: Yeah, I do want to hear if something sounds weird. I mean, the Burlington music scene is incredible right now, so it’s cool to be a part of it. And if I have lyrics I’m excited about or unsure of, I’ll show them to another person to either gain more confidence in them or pinpoint what’s weird about them.
‘Machine Wall’ is one of the songs where the lyrics feel less collage-like, and one line leads directly to the next. One that stood out to me particularly is, “It keeps on pushing forward even when you’re trying to eject/ We’re trying to return to where it feels like summer never left,” which seems to almost describe the tension of your music. I wonder if you feel like songwriting is about capturing a feeling that’s almost definitely gone.
NC: It’s hard to say. As far as songwriting to get back to a feeling you had before, there is a sense of nostalgia and maybe sugarcoating some of the imagery.
ZJ: But I don’t think the goal is to recreate anything. Because I don’t think it’s going to work, necessarily – it’s going to come out as a jumbled, bastardized feeling. ‘Machine Wall’ is very stream-of-consciousness, so maybe that’s why it sort of stays on topic.
NC: I wrote those lyrics in one session, which is unique for me. Usually, I write a lot of lyrics and come back to them a bunch of times, but that one was like a single day. We were in the studio with Benny and I had a few lines figured out, and by the end of the afternoon, we had the whole thing written. It was one of those days where you feel a little bit more tuned into the flow of it all.
Is that flow something you constantly reach for?
NC: Absolutely. I think that’s a state that is the dream to be able to tap into with more ease. One of our goals in making music over the next couple of years is to have an infrastructure in place for our lives so we can be in positions to do that. That moment was special because we were in the studio, we were really focused on it, and there wasn’t a lot of life interruption. In writing music going forward, I still want to be able to approach it in a bunch of different ways and come at it from many angles. I think we’ll become stronger songwriters every time we take a new, distinct concept and create something we’re proud of. But just being able to create more of a lifestyle for ourselves that will make it easier to songwrite without all the other fluff getting in the way.
What does that look like for you?
NC: We’re working on setting up a space in each of our houses where we have access to recording gear, at least to be able to do demos. Eventually, being able to spend less time on our day jobs to pay the bills – and we’ve already been able to do this a little bit by playing in other bands and touring as much as we can. We want to live more in music overall – being out there and playing, and even when we’re at home, just thinking about music.
ZJ: We’re both very recently out of college, and now we’re just thinking about what’s the best way to design our lives around the music, rather than fitting music into where there’s space.
NC: Especially while recording this record, we did it largely on weekends around everyone’s different work and school schedules, and we want to put ourselves in a position where music is more front and center.
ZJ: I guess that is like streamlining, but it’s streamlining the less fun stuff – the stuff that isn’t the making music part, so that the making music part can get even crazier and expand even more. We made Wild Guess just setting up our laptops on the coffee table and passing a pair of headphones back and forth because we had one pair of headphones. That’s where we’re coming from.
Can you each share one thing that inspires you about each other, be it musical or personal?
NC: I’m pretty expressive, very much thinking-out-loud, verbal processor. But I think there’s a sort of mystery to the way he thinks. [both laugh] Okay, yeah, it’s weird with you being right here. But when you take the time to ask him, “Hey, so what’s going on up there?,” it’s usually very deliberate and succinct. Not to make you feel any certain way about the way you think, but I think the way you process things is very straightforward, and for me, it’s kind of calming to be able to access and tap into that. Even me saying this is a pretty scattered way of doing it, but I can take my scattered idea and run it through you. You’re like, “Oh, yeah, it boils down to this.” I find that very cool.
ZJ: Thank you. Nina’s got a crazy work ethic, and that’s very inspiring to me. Nina’s very organized in her approach, which I’m not always. She displays a lot of the qualities of someone who just gets things done, which is great for me to be around. She’s able to take a structure of how to approach something and still feel that genuine inspiration and passion for the art within that structure, which is cool.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Robber Robber’s Wild Guess is out July 26.
