If you’ve seen the 1997 crime drama LA Confidential, you’re already familiar with the cryptic words Rolo Tomassi. It’s the name that the film’s protagonist – idealistic policeman Ed Exley, played by Guy Pearce – gives to the faceless criminal that murdered his father. “No one even knew who he was,” the detective divulges to his stoic sergeant. “I just made the name up to give him some personality.”
A similar mystery hangs like noirish fog around the band of the same name. On a musical level, they’re unclassifiable; arguably the most inventive heavy band currently working in the UK, who have made a masterpiece nearly two decades into their career. New album Where Myth Becomes Memory flits between seemingly incompatible genres: opening track Almost Always commences with shoegaze guitars, framing the silken singing of lead vocalist Eva Korman, then follow-up Cloaked plummets into a twisted metal riff as Korman snarls and screams. Post-rock, hardcore punk, piano pop and synth music all ensue before the LP has struck its final chord.
It turns out the band themselves are equally hard to pin down. Korman – speaking over Zoom from her home in New Jersey, where she migrated to from Brighton in 2018 – describes the defining themes of her band’s sixth album as being “rebirth, exploration and finding your way”. However, that’s the most you’ll get out of her.
“The beauty of the lyrics and even the title [of the album] itself – they’re things that you can draw your own meaning from,” she deflects when asked what it is, specifically, that the five-piece are exploring. Lyrics such as “On the worst days I slip, as deceitful as hope is / Walking on a knife-edge, I traced the line and I leapt”, heard during groove metal powerhouse Drip, connote an arduous escape from trauma, but the inspiration remains wilfully unclear.
By her own admission, Korman finds interviews nerve-racking, and her shy, delicate demeanour juxtaposes the screeching, contorting frontwoman that you’d see leading Rolo live. More outspoken is big brother and keyboardist James Spence, one year her elder, who joins the call from his home in East Sussex: 4,000 miles and five time zones away from his sister.
While, for Korman, Rolo’s lyrics haul a burden that she won’t share, in Spence’s mind, the band’s music is devoid of any purpose bar sounding good. “Where Myth Becomes Memory is a good album because it’s honest,” he gleams with pride. “It’s a record that was written by people who wanted to listen to music that sounded like that. I think the aim, certainly for me, is always to be in the band that would be your favourite band.”
Even Rolo’s name, despite being stolen from 90s neo-noir, doesn’t mean anything to him; it just has a nice ring to it. “I remember watching the film when I was younger and going, ‘That’d be a great band name,’ but people think we’re an Italian singer-songwriter.”
There’s an endearing simplicity to Spence’s worldview, unencumbered by commercial expectations or fears of backlash by fans that have hindered countless other artists. Preserving that innocence is the fact that, even though they played the band’s first show in their mid-teens, Korman and Spence have never pursued music full-time. To help pay the bills, she manages a boutique in New Jersey and he freelances for a booking agency. “I’ve never expected the music that I make to offer me a living,” Spence replies when asked if he’s happy with or frustrated by Rolo’s part-time status. “If that was the goal, we’d be a really different-sounding band.”
Rolo have at least achieved what Spence wanted them to when he started the band: escape the place he grew up in. He and his sister were raised in Stocksbridge, a small town 25 minutes north-west of Sheffield in rural South Yorkshire. “It was somewhere I wanted to leave quickly,” the now-Brighton-based Spence says, “and music seemed like a really good vehicle to get us away. It was the kind of place where, if you got to 16 and didn’t have a car, you couldn’t go anywhere.”
As well as being only one year apart, Korman and Spence shared the same social circles at school and were both multi-instrumentalists at an early age (they’d had piano lessons, Spence played guitar and Korman learned bass). In hindsight, starting a band together was inevitable.
“At the beginning, it was hard to be taken seriously,” Korman recalls. “We fought for a long time not to be treated like a novelty. There was either a big focus on our age or the fact that I was a woman.”
Sexism in heavy metal is, sadly, not surprising. Male-dominated ever since its formulation more than 50 years ago, the genre is awash with accusations of everything from casual prejudice against women to long-running abuse, even in 2022 (witness the sexual assault allegations against Marilyn Manson). Korman doesn’t want to discuss the topic beyond that brief allusion, though: “I think the focus is really promoting our new record, rather than going too deeply into that.” Similarly, a question about the band’s headspace after leaving their former label Holy Roar – which ceased activity in 2020, following allegations of sexual misconduct against its founder – is met with platitudes from Spence about “a great working relationship” with their new label.
On top of gender prejudice, Rolo’s eclectic yet unrefined debut album, 2008’s Hysterics, threatened to sideline them as a gimmick. It incorporated everything from punk to jazz – an exuberant mishmash that, although promising, led to their saddling with ridiculous genre tags. “I wasn’t a fan of being labelled ‘Nintendocore’ just because we’ve got keyboards,” Spence remembers.
Fortunately, it reached the ears of American DJ Diplo, whose collaborations with rapper MIA had made him one of the most eagerly watched producers on the planet. “He mentioned us in an interview with Pitchfork,” says Spence. “I didn’t even know who he was! It was an ex-girlfriend of mine that was like, ‘It’s a really huge deal.’”
The Diplo-produced lunacy of Cosmology was followed by Astraea, then the heartbroken hardcore of Grievances; the trilogy gradually anchored Rolo’s quirks into angular yet forlorn heaviness and pushed them higher in the metal consciousness. Then came Time Will Die and Love Will Bury It. The progressive hardcore behemoth was a critical darling and, on streaming services, is far and away the band’s most-heard outing, amassing hundreds of thousands of listeners.
“I think everyone’s reaction to Time Will Die caught us by surprise,” recalls Spence. “I didn’t come away from [recording] it thinking, this is gonna be something people are really, really going to like.”
In late 2018, only months after Time Will Die came out, Korman settled in the US to be with her husband Jesse, the lead singer of mathcore outfit The Number Twelve Looks Like You. The move, combined with the Covid-19 pandemic, led to Where Myth Becomes Memory being recorded separately; as Korman clocked out in New Jersey, her bandmates were starting their day in Southampton.
Questions about the pandemic’s effect on Rolo as a band are answered in pragmatic terms, and the emotional throes of isolation – the potential conflict of Korman being with her new husband yet kept apart by the virus from everybody back home for two years – aren’t explored in any depth. “I didn’t know when I was going to see the band again, when I was going to see my family or friends again,” Korman remembers, “so it just didn’t seem helpful to me at that time to really dig deeply into that feeling.” Even as they release the most engaging music of their career, they remain as enigmatic as their namesake.
• Where Myth Becomes Memory is out on 4 February on MNRK.
