During the previous summer, John Robinson and Leela Hoehn caught an impressive performance by Lifeguard, a bold young Chicago noise-rock trio, at the Masquerade in Atlanta. The show was remarkable, yet its brisk intensity left Robinson feeling disheartened. If players this fresh could be this adept, he reasoned, what chance would someone starting anew in his forties have? “It’s over for me,” he later recalled thinking.
The following morning, those sensations found form as “Bad Feeling,” a fresh track for their duo-project Ultra Lights, which he makes with Hoehn. “Well it’s a pretty nice day for a kick in the face!” Robinson opens, his voice carrying the restless echo of Stephen Malkmus while nudging toward Julian Casablancas. In the studio cut released last month as the lead single from Ultra Lights’ debut album Pleasure’s All Yours, bassist Alex Wharton and drummer Gus Fernandez hammer away behind Robinson’s piercing chords and Hoehn’s droning shriek as he continues, “Well if you like it so much, you can take my place/ There’s no ice cream on my plate.” The track tightens into a hypnotic groove, and by the moment Robinson sings, “I got me a bad feeling,” it evokes a garage-rock sock-hop breaking out.
Even as despair about fading relevance consumed him, Robinson kept turning out high-energy songs. This band already has a cache of them. It’s striking to consider that Robinson could feel defeat after releasing last year’s Ultra Lights, an EP that gathered the band’s string of 7” singles into one of the most formidable indie-rock introductions in recent memory. Yet appraising Pleasure’s All Yours reveals that existential frustration rather than resignation drives his writing.
Today’s new single, “Good Enough,” centers on the Sisyphean quest for inner peace and enlightenment amid a world of craving and emptiness. Robinson laments humanity’s endless appetites and the hollowness that follows when we indulge them, questions why the answers to life’s biggest questions often never arrive, and even nods to last year’s TikTok-influenced beef-tallow skincare trend. “I’m casting a big shadow/ This world will swallow me up,” he belts. “I’m searching for distraction/ But nothing is ever good enough.” Meanwhile his bandmates fuse raw elements of the Stooges and the Velvet Underground into a fuzzed-out pop tune, Hoehn’s high-tuned riff skittering across the mix, Wharton’s bass propelling upward at the chorus. In essence, it’s a reimagining of “The Modern Age” for today’s era.
Apologies for dragging in the Strokes comparison, but there are moments when this band makes me fall for Is This It all over again at eighteen. They eclipse the living Strokes in the moment. Many hailed 2020’s The New Abnormal as a return to form, yet Pleasure’s All Yours serves as a reminder of what form truly sounds like. It stands among the finest debut albums in recent memory—no frills, no filler, just eleven tracks you can’t stop playing since they landed in my inbox. (And yes: the writer of NME’s five-star review of Is This It was John Robinson. Fate, indeed!)
Not that the surefire buzz band of 2001 is the sole influence in the mix. When Robinson, now 42, fronted Turf War in the 2010s, he’d blast Stones and Dinosaur Jr. in the van the way any seasoned elder millennial rocker with access to his parents’ records would. He’s deeply into Australian garage rockers like Eddy Current Suppression Ring, which explains why Mikey Young was tapped to master Pleasure’s All Yours. He reveres Deerhunter as Atlanta’s greatest band of all time, though you can also hear the party-hearted garage rock of Deerhunter’s friends Black Lips in his music. And yes, Pavement’s shadow is unmistakable, which I’m not about to apologize for—because if you’re like me, a band launching gritty pop between Pavement and the Strokes is the dream squad.
On “Nostalgia,” a gleefully catchy EP track re-recorded for Pleasure’s All Yours, Ultra Lights critique the way brainless retro-mania can swell into MAGA-like longing for a rosier past. Yet with these influences, they’re also hopeful that society’s growing appetite for older music might tilt in their favor. If it doesn’t win over Gen Z, it should still resonate with listeners in the band’s age group. Ultra Lights aren’t rushing to move beyond their weekend-warrior status unless a major opportunity arises; Robinson has already paid his dues touring with Turf War and his other project Illegal Drugs (RIYL Hot Snakes, Drug Church) in his twenties and early thirties.
“I’m a lot more realistic about my expectations,” Robinson reflects on band life in his forties. “I’m far more focused on making something final that I truly enjoy rather than worrying about others’ expectations.” In his twenties, “we had managers telling us what to do, and I got pretty caught up in what others expected of me. Now it’s more about, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
Ultra Lights took shape during the pandemic. After a decade in Atlanta and a spell in Athens, Robinson and Hoehn moved back to their hometown of Augusta to raise their young son among family. Turf War and Illegal Drugs had dissolved, and Robinson was out of the game. But during lockdown, he sharpened his craft as a songwriter and producer, even composing and recording an entire unreleased album to rekindle his creativity. Meanwhile Hoehn, a professional illustrator without prior music experience, decided to learn guitar after Robinson gifted 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 connect her pedal board. She learned fast, as Pleasure’s All Yours demonstrates.
The band didn’t truly take off until the family moved back to Atlanta. Their Augusta lockdown era overlapped with COVID restrictions, and it left them craving the city up the road. Robinson began commuting two hours to attend shows in Atlanta as soon as live music resumed. Before long, they moved back, and with Wharton and Fernandez on board, Ultra Lights came to life.
At their second show, they caught the eye of the eccentric local figure Henry Owings, founder of the 1990s-era music and humor magazine Chunklet and its label, who became the band’s “crazy uncle” and one-man promo engine. Owings volunteered to release a 7”, which ballooned into the three singles assembled on their EP. He’s also releasing the album and helping Ultra Lights search for a larger label to push them forward.
Another Atlanta staple, Kris Sampson, joined to co-produce Pleasure’s All Yours after a chance meeting with Wharton at a neighborhood cafe. Robinson and Hoehn describe Sampson, whose previous clients include Omni and the Coathangers, as bringing a contagious energy to sessions that stretched across many months. That extended timeline was partly due to budget limits and partly because Sampson persuaded Ultra Lights to expand the project from an EP to a full-length, a challenge they embraced. “I’ve never enjoyed recording,” Robinson admits. “It’s always been incredibly stressful. So, yes, this was fantastic.”
Those good vibes permeate the entire album, even as Robinson’s lyrics brim with ambivalence. Hoehn aimed to capture that tension in the art direction, helping to shape the cover as a textured collage centered on one of her mother’s old paintings. She also integrated Robinson’s hand drawings, found imagery, and the cartoon monkey that has become part of the band’s visual identity. The result is a classic indie-rock package designed to reflect the music’s core ethos.
“John’s songs, they’re all about existential dread in some way,” Hoehn explains, “whether it’s the dread of work or what we’re consuming—social media and the lifestyle we’re living now. There’s a constant questioning of whether any of us truly know what we’re doing.” She sums it up: “None of us knows what the hell is going on, but that’s okay. We’re all in it together.”
That may be true, but Ultra Lights certainly sound like they know what they’re doing, even (perhaps especially) when haunted by the belief that they’re being outpaced by musicians half their age.
Pleasure’s All Yours is out 7/10 on Chunklet. Pre-order it here.
