- What inspired the name of the band and what are your influences?
Whatever it was that originally inspired the band name has been lost to time, as we came up with it when we were teenagers, but it was resurrected simply because we couldn’t decide on anything better. So here we are. Our collective influences are all over the place, from The Clash to Bergman movies, The Simpsons to the eerie similarity of off-highway strips of homogeneous gas stations and hotels, mental illness and Communist Germany etc. Basically we take in a lot and try to morph it into something that’s of interest both to us and you guys. Not sure if we’ve succeeded yet but damn if we won’t keep trying.
- How do you approach songwriting? Are there any themes that you are keen to explore when you start off?
Our process is messy, inconsistent, and constantly evolving. Sometimes we write collectively, sometimes it’s largely the effort of one person. A song can be finished in 45 minutes or 7 months, it can vary wildly over the process or basically just be a one-shot. We’re still learning and hopefully always will be. If we have a big, overarching consistent theme it’s the recognition that we’re all pretty weird. We’re dad-bod having nerdy men in our late twenties with minimal social skills, so we’ll never be cool and were essentially doomed to failure before we began. But instead of turning that into some kind of repressed incel-like rage we intend to do exactly the opposite and embrace who we are and try to beat the odds to fail very gracefully. Our first album was in fact called Fail Better and was really inspired by Samuel Beckett’s philosophy of essentially admitting you’re a fuck-up who knows nothing but aspiring to be the best version of that possible (that’s a big paraphrase and probably misinterpretation but oh well.) There’s also reoccurring themes of societal collapse, our responsibility as privileged men, our love of Futurama etc.
- Why do you write the sort of music that you do?
Well we covered the thematic bits in the last question. Musically speaking we’re all massive fans of music in general, first off, and more specifically a hell of a lot of varieties in terms of genre and style. We’re very aware that we’re not reinventing the wheel here, we’re a four piece with largely basic rock instrumentation. But that being said we try to pull from our big pile of influences individually and mix them all together to create some kind of weird combination that’s unique in it’s own right. We hope we’re stealing gracefully from our forebears, basically. We also want to be in a constant state of evolution. With every release we’d like to incorporate new elements while still keeping some kind of core of whatever it is people like about us intact.
- How do you decide what songs to perform live and how do you transpose them into that live setting?
At this point our catalog is about twenty original songs or so, so our set is pretty much just composed of all of our material and then a cover or two if we feel the need. We always throw a bit of improv into our songs when performing them live just to keep things from getting stale but by and large they’ve all been written so that the translation from live to studio is pretty similar. In the future we’ll probably be a bit more experimental in the studio and need to transpose things differently. But that’s future Robots problems.
- What are your plans for the future?
Grow more as a band and as people. Neither of things are literal. Tour as much as possible, put out an incredible second album that defies everyone’s expectations. Make a decent shirt design. The usual.