Nina Cates was talking about the many myths of rock and roll when she suddenly remembered one of her favorites. “Did you ever hear the conspiracy theory about Elvis being replaced by his twin brother?” asked the singer and guitarist of Burlington indie rockers Robber Robber, who had sat down recently with her partner and bandmate, Zack James, to chat about their new record. “Supposedly, Elvis was too tough to control, so they switched him out after the war.”
Beside her, James chuckled. “I love those ones,” he said. “Like, Paul is dead, but they replaced him with someone better?” he wondered aloud, referring to the old theory that the Beatles’ Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a ringer.
“Yeah, Billy Shears wrote some bangers, man,” Cates added, referencing Beatles drummer Ringo Starr’s alter ego and sending both rockers into a fit of laughter.
The duo, who are both in their twenties, were riffing on the power of stories in rock with good reason. Robber Robber’s new record, Two Wheels Move the Soul, is a powerhouse of indie rock and post-punk dynamism, a high-water mark for a band that keeps setting new ones. Cates, James, guitarist Will Krulak and bassist Carney Hemler display an utter fearlessness about stretching their sound, from fuzzed-out ’90s alt-rock (“Talkback”) to UK grime beats (“The Sound It Made”) to tracks that reflect their fondness for Elvis Presley — such as the barely recognizable cover of the classic “Suspicious Minds” they released last year.
Robber Robber’s malleable sonic aesthetic, lurching from experimental to pop and back again, has never felt so concentrated yet simultaneously free to roam as it does on Two Wheels. Released on April 3, the record has already captured attention from the likes of Pitchfork, Stereogum and Paste.
The hard-touring band will play a homecoming show this Friday, April 24, at BCA Studios on Pine Street in Burlington to celebrate the release of a record ensconced in its own bit of mythology.
While the band was writing and recording Two Wheels, its follow-up to 2024’s excellent Wild Guess, a fire broke out in the Burlington apartment building where Cates and James lived together, destroying many of the units. The couple were essentially homeless for a few months, couch surfing and house-sitting, and that nomadic state of living influenced the new record.
Still, James is quick to point out that the fire wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it could have been for him and Cates and their cat, Bonzo.
“I don’t like to make it too much about the fire, to be honest,” he admitted, noting that while most of the building burned, their apartment made it through largely unscathed. “It’s pretty weird, because the fire destroyed everybody else’s stuff, but we were so joyful and relieved that our cat survived and our stuff was intact. So it really could have gone much worse for us.”
While a fire is a great narrative for a record, Cates stressed that what the incident impressed on them was a profound love for their Burlington community.
That feeling of your community having your back, it’s really special.
Nina Cates
“Knowing that our friends were there for us, they were willing to host us, even the ones who were allergic to Bonzo — that feeling of your community having your back, it’s really special,” Cates said.
That community is brimming with creativity and talent as well. Despite the time they spend on the road, Robber Robber remain close friends with many of their peers in one of the most exciting eras for Queen City music in years. Acts such as Greg Freeman, Lily Seabird, Roost.World, the Dead Shakers and James’ other project, Dari Bay, add up to a vibrant scene that already has national outlets gushing about “the Burlington sound.”
The success of their friends’ bands serves as inspiration for Robber Robber.
“We’re all in contact and listening to each other’s records,” James said. “We hang out; we share demos; we play on each other’s songs.”
When they hear Two Wheels Move the Soul, those other Burlington musicians may recognize the specific kind of anxiety that beats at the heart of the record. No ground feels that stable in the world laid out on the album, no communication can be totally trusted, and an impending, nameless doom lurks just over the horizon.
“Upend, upend, upend,” Cates sings on “Avalanche Sound Effect,” a disjointed rocker with drums that sound like very rhythmic-minded raccoons going nuts on trash cans at night. “So we dance / Pressure crack / Avalanche sound effect.”
Transience drives the songs. This is music for the casually lost, people who might not be sure where they are but shrug off the question with a nihilistic sneer and carry on. The album’s mood fits the Burlington scene to a T — a small, art-loving city that is increasingly unaffordable for artists to live in and a thriving music scene that keeps losing venues.
For all that, the record is something of a love letter to the community. “We fuck with Burlington. We love it.” James said.
The city is Cates and James’ second musical home. They grew up in Brattleboro, playing in the teen rock group the Snaz, before moving to Burlington to attend the University of Vermont in 2019. At the time, Brattleboro felt to them more like a part of western Massachusetts’ music scene than Vermont’s. They said that vibe has shifted as Brattleboro bands such as THUS LOVE break out.
“We still have a lot of love for Brattleboro,” James said. “We’re still extremely close with the scene, but we’re just a lot more tight with our Burlington crew these days. That’s our home scene.”
Two Wheels Move the Soul might just be the ideal soundtrack to their home scene. There’s something perfectly disjointed about the songs on the record; they rarely follow traditional structures, abandoning the idea of a bridge at times and becoming explosions in slow motion. They don’t feel raw or unfinished but rather built with an M.C. Escher-like ethos that subverts order.
James and Cates (and Bonzo, of course) moved into a new apartment in the Old North End of Burlington last June. With the fire behind them, they have the sounds of Two Wheels Move the Soul, a record set amid chaos, destruction and found community, to mark that turbulent time in their lives.
The album seems to score a generational unease, a growing feeling of impermanence, undercut by a commitment to holding on to love as all else collapses. Just don’t wax too philosophical about it to the band.
“We don’t really think about it much once we’ve wrapped the record,” Cates admitted. “Seeing what other people think when they hear the songs is always fascinating … but, I mean, we’re already working on the next album. Hopefully, no more fires, though.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Forged in Fire | Robber Robber’s new album was born amid destruction”
This article appears in April 22 • 2026.
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