Band To Watch: Ultra Lights

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Last summer John Robinson and Leela Hoehn went to see the impressive young Chicago noise-rock trio Lifeguard at the Masquerade in Atlanta. It was an incredible show, but the bracing quality of the band’s performance left Robinson feeling bummed. If these kids are this young and are already that good, he reasoned, what hope is there for a guy starting fresh in his forties? “It’s over for me,” he remembers thinking to himself.

The next morning, Robinson channeled those vibes into “Bad Feeling,” a new song for his and Hoehn’s band Ultra Lights. “Well it’s a pretty nice day for a kick in the face!” Robinson begins, sounding like Stephen Malkmus agitated to find himself morphing into Julian Casablancas. In the studio recording, released last month as lead single from Ultra Lights’ debut album Pleasure’s All Yours, bassist Alex Wharton and drummer Gus Fernandez pound away behind Robinson’s piercing strums and Hoehn’s droning squall as he continues, “Well if you like it so much, you can take my place/ There’s no ice cream on my plate.” The band builds up intensity, locking into a mesmerizing groove. By the time Robinson declares, “I got me a bad feeling,” it sounds like a garage-rock sock-hop is breaking out.

By now, the irony has hit you with the immediacy of an Ultra Lights track: In his despair about feeling washed up, Robinson penned another banger. Even at this early phase, this band has a lot of those to their name. It’s crazy to think Robinson would be so dejected about his own musical prospects after releasing an EP as accomplished as last year’s Ultra Lights, which compiled the band’s string of 7” singles into one of the most formidable indie rock introductions in recent memory. But spend any time with Pleasure’s All Yours and you’ll realize existential frustrations are his chosen songwriting fuel.

Today’s new single “Good Enough,” for instance, is about the Sisyphean struggle to find peace and enlightenment in this world. Robinson laments our species’ bottomless appetites and the emptiness that ensues when we indulge them, wonders why answers to life's big questions never seem to materialize, and even references last year’s TikTok-borne beef tallow skincare trend. “I’m casting a big shadow/ This world will swallow me up,” he sings. “I’m searching for distraction/ But nothing is ever good enough.” Meanwhile his bandmates wrangle raw elements of the Stooges and the Velvet Underground into a fuzzed-out pop song, Hoehn’s high-string riff dancing atop the mix, Wharton’s bass surging skyward at the chorus. Basically, it’s “The Modern Age” for the modern age.

Sorry to belabor the Strokes comparison, but there are times when this band makes me feel like I’m falling in love with Is This It at age 18 all over again. They put the real-life present-tense Strokes to shame. A lot of people (including me!) called 2020’s The New Abnormal a return to form, but Pleasure’s All Yours is a reminder of what form actually sounds like. It’s one of the finest debut albums in recent memory — no frills, no filler, just 11 compulsively listenable tracks that have been on loop since they hit my inbox. (Also: the name of the guy who wrote NME's five-star review of Is This It? John Robinson! It's kismet!)

Not that the hottest buzz band of 2001 is the only classic influence in the mix. Back when Robinson, 42, was fronting Turf War in the 2010s, he was blasting the Stones and Dinosaur Jr. in the tour van like any discerning elder millennial rocker with access to his parents’ record collection and a copy of Our Band Could Be Your Life. Robinson is way into Australian garage rockers like Eddy Current Suppression Ring, which is why he got Mikey Young to master Pleasure’s All Yours. He calls Deerhunter the greatest Atlanta band of all time, though I hear the party-time garage rock of Deerhunter's pals Black Lips in his music too. And, yes, there is the unmissable Pavement resemblance, which I am also sorry to belabor — but not that sorry, because if you’re like me, a band launching skuzzy pop songs into the space between Pavement and the Strokes is the band of your dreams.

On “Nostalgia,” a ridiculously fun clap-along EP track re-recorded for Pleasure’s All Yours, Ultra Lights lament the way braindead retromania can metastasize into MAGA-style longing for a rose-colored past. But with influences like these, they’re also optimistic that our culture’s growing preference for older music might work out in their favor. If it doesn’t win over Gen Z, it’s certainly primed to connect with listeners in the band’s age bracket. Not that Ultra Lights intend to graduate beyond their current weekend warrior status unless opportunity strikes; Robinson has been there, done that after spending his twenties and early thirties touring hard with Turf War and his other band Illegal Drugs (RIYL Hot Snakes, Drug Church).

“I'm a lot more realistic about my expectations,” Robinson says of band life in his forties. “I'm way more concerned about getting the finished product to be like something that I actually enjoy instead of worrying about what other people's expectations are.” In his twenties, “we had managers, and they were telling us stuff to do, and I got pretty caught up in what other people's expectations are for me. And now it's more like, ‘This is what I want to do.’”

Ultra Lights took shape during the pandemic. After a decade in Atlanta and a few years in Athens, Robinson and Hoehn had moved back to their hometown of Augusta to raise their young son around their relatives. Turf War and Illegal Drugs had both broken up, and Robinson was out of the game. But during lockdown, he started honing his craft as a songwriter and producer, even writing and recording an entire unreleased album to get his creative juices flowing again. Meanwhile Hoehn, a professional illustrator with no prior music experience, decided to finally learn how to play guitar after Robinson got her a Squier Mustang for Christmas.

“He had plans to start this project and already had songs going for it, and he asked me if I wanted to play guitar, which was the craziest thing. I thought there was something wrong with him,” says Hoehn, 41. “We've never played music together. We've collaborated in all kinds of other ways, but music was always kind of separate.” Ultra Lights became her “trial by fire” — learning the songs, learning how to perform live, even learning how to plug in her pedal board. She was a quick study, as Pleasure’s All Yours puts on full display.

The band didn’t properly get going until the family returned to Atlanta. Their pandemic-era stint in Augusta coincided with COVID lockdown, and it made them miss the metropolis up the road. Robinson was making the two-hour drive to see shows in Atlanta as soon as live music started happening again. Soon, they moved back to town, and with the addition of Wharton and Fernandez, Ultra Lights was up and running.

At their second show, they caught the attention of eccentric local luminary Henry Owings, founder of the essential ‘90s music and humor magazine Chunklet and its associated record label, who became the band’s “crazy uncle” and one-man promo machine. Owings volunteered to release a 7”, which ballooned into the three singles collected on their EP. He’s putting out the album, too, and helping Ultra Lights look for a bigger label to take them to the next level.

Another Atlanta fixture, Kris Sampson, signed on to co-produce Pleasure’s All Yours after a chance encounter with Wharton at a local coffee shop. Robinson and Hoehn say Sampson, whose previous clients include Omni and the Coathangers, brought a contagious enthusiasm to the sessions, which were spread out over the course of many months. That was partially due to financial constraints and partially because Sampson convinced Ultra Lights to expand the project from an EP to a full-length, a challenge they were happy to oblige. “I've never had fun recording,” Robinson says. “It's always just been incredibly stressful. So yeah, it was awesome.”

Those good vibes are coursing all throughout the album, even as Robinson’s lyrics brim with ambivalence. It’s a contrast Hoehn aimed to capture as she art-directed the album with input from Robinson, building out the cover art into a textured collage centered on one of her mom’s old paintings. She also worked in Robinson's hand drawings, found images, and the cartoon monkey character that has become part of the band’s visual signature. They ended up with a classically indie rock packshot designed to mirror the music’s ethos.

“John's songs, they're all about existential dread in some way,” Hoehn says, “whether it's the existential dread of work or just, like, what we're consuming — social media and the lifestyle we all are living currently. There's a constant questioning of, do any of us really know what we're doing?” She sums it up like so: "None of us know what the hell is going on, but it's OK. We're all in it together."

That may be true, but Ultra Lights sound like they know what they’re doing, even (maybe especially) when dogged by the belief that they’re getting lapped by kids half their age.