When Fleet, Hampshire trio Drug Store Romeos started making music together as teenagers, their sound was indebted to post-punk, heavy and raw. But then Sarah Downie, Charlie Henderson and Jonny Gilbert started listening to such cosmic trailblazers as Spacemen 3, Galaxie 500 and Broadcast, and their approach transformed, their songs taking on a more dreamy and hypnotic form. On the group’s debut album, The world within our bedrooms, they craft a series of indie-pop gems out of the haze, balancing sonic exploration with enchanting hooks and intricate dynamism. Their minimalist approach was forced on them by necessity, but it has opened up exciting new avenues. “I started playing keyboards, which meant I couldn’t play the bass,” Downie tells Apple Music. “We had to pick between guitar or bass, because we only have so many hands, and Charlie started playing bass. It meant our songs had to be stripped-back. Charlie started playing the bass in a more melodic way rather than just trying to fill in the foundation.” Their lean, lo-fi grooves are the perfect soundbed for tales of isolation and reflection, trying to make sense of a chaotic world as their teens became their early twenties. “We came from a very small town,” says Downie. “We were cut off a lot from the world, and I think that introspectiveness, with all the time we had to overanalyse ourselves, wrote itself into the music.” It is, explains Downie, an album that captures a coming-of-age, a record that fills you with hope when you come out the other side. Here, the three-piece take us through their journey, track by track. “Building Song” Sarah Downie: “It does what it says on the tin. We gave it that name but kept going, ‘We need to find a good name for this. That’s such a cop-out.’ And it just became that. I think it’s quite fitting.” Charlie Henderson: “It’s got a feeling, an atmosphere, that’s quite central to the world that we were trying to create. Naturally, throughout the song, it layers up over time and everything—it feels like a nice way to introduce the whole sound of the album.” “Secret Plan” CH: “This was written at 2 in the morning whilst my housemates were having a drum ’n’ bass party downstairs. I made the synth line and the bass part, and then, for the vocals, I was just improvising while this intense drum ’n’ bass was going on downstairs. It was quite chaotic. If ‘Building Song’ is the establishing shot, this is the first scene that’s in this slightly spooky, surreal suburban town. I hope people can dance to it, but also I imagine people listening to this album alone on headphones.” “Bow Wow” SD: “This was written when I got a Casio Casiotone CT 1000P, which has shaped a lot of our music. If you have headphones on and you’re listening carefully enough, you can just about hear my heartbeat in this song. Me and our producer, George Murphy, were in the studio at 2 am and we were pretty knackered, doing vocals over and over again. The lyrics—‘My heart rate increases’—were going through my head and I needed to get more energy in my body, so I started running around the studio. Then I put the microphone on my shirt and we recorded my heartbeat. George quantised it so that it’s going along with the kick.” “Elevator” CH: “I did a lot of experimenting, a lot of different things went onto that, but it was quite surprising it worked. They’re quite similar—both emotional and intense. The melody feels like it’s coming from a similar place, and they just locked together.” “Walking Talking Marathon” SD: “I wanted a song that didn’t fit into some chorus-verse-chorus, strophic structure. I pieced together from magazines, from things I’d been watching at the time, any little bits and bobs, phrases. The goal is to have as little friction between me and my instruments and what’s coming out of my mouth as possible.” “Frame of Reference” CH: “I spent about a year struggling with depression, but I’d still gone to festivals that summer. And so, a couple of times, there were hundreds of people dancing around me, and I was dancing, but I felt really crushed and empty, yet dense at the same time—whilst also being on ecstasy. The strangeness of that feeling, that artificial euphoria with this deep human sadness combining, was such a potent and unique emotion to me.” “Feedback Loop” CH: “I was really happy with the lyrics in this song. To me, this is, like, an 11 pm song—as you’re walking home, you don’t particularly want to go home and you’re aimlessly wandering around a little bit. I remember me and Sarah were in my garden and I was so obsessed with Molly Nilsson’s song ‘Hey Moon!’. I smoked a joint and listened to it five times and then came in, and then we wrote the chorus of ‘Feedback Loop’.” “What’s on Your Mind” SD: “Half of this was improvised in the studio. I think there was some technical difficulty that George was trying to figure out, and we were just mucking around, and he thought it was quite interesting so he pressed record and that was one of those lovely studio moments where a song comes out quite a lot differently than when it came in.” “No Placing” Jonny Gilbert: “This was written at a marijuana-and-music evening at Charlie’s house. It wasn’t an organised band writing session—more of an impromptu, just-for-enjoyment session. It was an evening of getting down parts that Charlie then spent more time crafting over the next few weeks, and with the help of Sarah, he brought it into a full song. It’s one of the most uptempo ones we’ve got, but to me, it will always feel nighttime because it was written entirely at nighttime.” “Vibrate” CH: “It was quite different to what we really wanted to do, and then our managers said it was pretty much their favourite song we’d ever written. We wanted to make songs that were dreamier and playful, but this one is quite dark and a bit serious. I like it now though.” “Electric Silence” SD: “This was around the time I was reading the The Secret Life of Plants, which is a book that talks a lot about Cleve Backster and his experiments in the 1960s with a polygraph test and plants. It’s a fun little one. I guess it’s just a cute little song. On my Casio, we had this auto-bass that makes these different rhythms and stuff, and we use one which I’m pretty sure is ABBA. We used that a lot.” JG: “It’s very bop-bop-boop-boop.” “Kites” SD: “‘Kites’ was written when I was in Winchester with my dad in the first part of lockdown. There was this hill that I would go to most days. It was carved out by the surrounding foothills of Winchester, and when you were on the hill, you could see the city in the foreground and this little hill adjacent from my hill. You could see people having picnics and dogs running up, people running up. I guess I was inspired by the open space, and I kind of wanted to spin up out of my body and be one with the clouds.” “Put Me on the Finish Line” SD: “This song was hanging around for ages. I created the keyboard line, but I didn’t really know where to go from there. I had this verse, but I could never, ever get a chorus for it. It means that the person that wrote that song all those years ago feels like a completely different person to who I was finishing it. But, thankfully, those two people seem to get along.” “Cycle of Life” SD: “This was written in about 20 minutes. Jonny had been watching this documentary on life cycles, nature, sandstorms and the movement of currents and diatoms.” JG: “I started writing down what they said in the documentary to try and understand it, and it was on the wall when Sarah was making music. She started to fit it into her lyrics, and we realised it could be a thing.” SD: “It’s our most factual song. It’s a little palate cleanser.” “Adult Glamour” SD: “This is our oldest song. It feels like family to me. We spent months mixing it in my dad’s study in Fleet, encasing it in as many layers as we could. It was finished after this very intense acid trip that me and Charlie had where we got extremely into the personalities of sounds, thinking about the tones and what they create, just getting very into the tiny intricacies. It’s about the desensitising nature of technology. After that acid trip, I got rid of my phone for about a year. It was a naive thing to do but was also quite good for me. As most people are, I was very addicted to my phone and I hated that.”