Drug Store Romeos are building their own world.
The Hampshire trio formed at school, and their genre-less creativity moves from post-punk to pop, from grinding electronics to flora, bucolic melody.
Constantly challenging themselves, sessions for their debut album ‘The world within our bedrooms’ took place at London’s Eastcote Studios with regular producer George Murphy. Burrowing within themselves, it’s a record marked by real individuality, with Drug Store Romeos attempting to tell the whole truth, and nothing bu the truth.
The three-piece comment…
“The album is a journey of emotions and colour schemes. A lot of bands have a consistent emotion across their whole album but we wanted to reflect the ever changing nature of someone’s mental state over a period of time. We always wanted to create our own world, and as a three we have this force field around us.”
A truly bewitching record, Clash spoke to Drug Store Romeos about their cultural pursuits…
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Book…
Food Of The Gods by Terrance McKenna.
Among other interesting theories Terrance McKenna puts forth his ‘stoned ape’ theory in this book.
He thinks that psychedelic mushrooms are the reason that the human brain trippled in size and complexity over a few million years – a very short time for this scale of development. He also points to mushrooms as one of the reasons that humans became the dominant species. In short he thinks that early humans were coming out of the forest into more open areas. They would most likely have been tracking wildabeast and cows by following their dung and hoofprints. It’s a fact that a certain type of psychedelic mushroom grows out of their dung and so Terrance thinks that these early homonoids ate these mushrooms.
In small doses they improve your eye sight, your awareness of predators and also your sexual energy. In slightly higher doses they give the brain a lottt of stimulation with the visuals they create and the thoughts they bring out of you. They also strengthen community and relationship bonds. Mushrooms are very interlinked with language. He thinks they promoted the desire to communicate more effectively. He also thinks they made us more creative and increased the amount of art we produced. The visuals alone could have led to spirituality / religion. (Charlie)
TV…
I don’t really watch TV anymore – the time that I would have spent watching it tv a couple of years ago I now usually spend watching YouTube videos or movies. However last year I was really into a show by Vox called Explained. They have episodes on animal intelligence, the worlds water crisis, genetic code, cults and wildly they put out an episode called The Next Pandemic about two months before covid hit the whole world. They predicted that a serious pandemic could happen fairly soon and I remember sitting there imagining how crazy it would be for that to happen… and then it happened. (Charlie)
Gadget…
I recently got my first fountain pen since school, I don’t know how old fashioned counting a fountain pen as a gadget makes me but this little guy is so cool. It’s a Lamy Pre-school fountain pen made from wood and red plastic ends oh man. It never fails to tickle a little excitement and pride in my belly whenever I pull it out. Though, if were talking high tech sophistication innovation it’ll be my baby-g watch. It means I don’t need to look at my phone nearly as much and is probably the watch equivalent of a tamagotchi. I’m becoming the kids I always wanted to be in primary school, minus the heelies, if she could only see me now. (Sarah)
Music…
The music that excites me the most these days is Jockstrap. To be honest the first half of ‘The City’ is some of the best songwriting I’ve heard in a very long time. There’s so much instinct and freedom in the way the melody dances with the piano, carving out these strange spaces in my mind and giving me emotions I haven’t experienced much in music.
I’m pretty obsessed with that feeling in the first half and I’ve played it a silly amount. The other half of the song is a switch like you wouldn’t believe. The bravest music I’ve probably ever heard. (Sarah)
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‘The world within our bedrooms’ is out now.
Photo Credit: Neelam Khan Vela
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