Ultra Lights frontman John Robinson is still figuring things out

In the months leading to the pandemic, John Robinson intended to continue writing and recording with his previous band, Illegal Drugs – an idea he abandoned when primary collaborator Tom O’Neill moved from Georgia to Colorado.

“At the time, we were going to have a kid, and we were about to move to Athens, [Georgia].” Robinson said by phone in late October from his current home in Atlanta. “So, we were going to be changing our life, but I was still going to be making music. … And when he cut it off and moved, I don’t know that it was like, ‘I’m never going to play music again,’ but it was like, ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.’”

And so, Robinson sought out new ways to occupy his time, experimenting with jujitsu, exercise, biohacking, and “all kinds of stupid shit,” as he explained it, “because I just didn’t have music as that outlet anymore.”

As Covid took hold, though, lockdowns led to a months-long stretch where Robinson lived as a stay-at-home dad to his then-infant son, unable to work his restaurant industry job. In that time, he began to rediscover classic bands like Wire and Public Image Limited, as well as comparatively modern artists like Parquet Courts and Iceage, whose sound owes ample debt to those post-punk pioneers. 

“And in that, I was like, I think I want to do rock n’ roll again,” said Robinson, who immediately began to demo songs for what would ultimately become rising quartet Ultra Lights, which visits Rumba Cafe for a concert on Saturday, Nov. 7, supported by Paper Airplane and Killdeer. “And I wanted to do it in the way I wish I would have when I was younger, but with more skill and better songs.”

Pleasure’s All Yours, released in July via Chunklet, delivers on this promise, Robinson teaming with his partner, the guitarist Leela Hoehn, bassist Alex Wharton, and drummer Gus Fernandez to crank out a set of relentlessly infectiously garage rock tunes that would have sounded entirely at home emanating from the iconic (and now shuttered) NYC club CBGBs in the early 2000s.

Though musically upbeat, the bulk of the songs are shot through with an existential dread that Robinson attributed in part to his nature – “I’ve never been one to write love songs,” he said – and in part to living in a social and political era that has been in relative freefall since even before Covid.

“We’re living in a time where you’re either laser-focused on politics and what’s going on in the world … or you’re trying to just avoid it and get through life and it’s still just over your head constantly,” he said. “And it’s not like I’m on social media, but I see what’s going on, and I have a lot of dread about the state of the world. And having a kid, I think, makes you feel a little bit of guilt and a lot of concern for the future. And all of that get mixed up in the songwriting.”

Elsewhere in Ultra Lights’ catalog, Robinson lingers on the realities of aging, with “Scene of the Crime,” off the band’s self-titled 2025 debut EP, surveying the freedom that can come with youth, and album cut “Wild on the Outside” lamenting the way the years can fly by in an instant. “Where does all the time go?” he sings.

As a younger man playing in his first band Turf War, Robinson said he experienced some modest success, signing with a management company and appearing at the odd music festival. But he could never have anticipated the buzz that has developed around Ultra Lights, whose full-length has earned deserved praise from the likes of Stereogum and Pitchfork, granting Robinson the kind of audience at age 42 that he might have pined for in his early 20s.

And yet, the increased spotlight has changed little for the musician. He still holds down a restaurant gig. He still loves being in a band because of the sense of connection he feels in with playing music with other human beings. And he still embraces songwriting as a means to share those parts of himself that he wishes others to understand more fully. “It’s an important part of me,” he said. “I’ve been doing this since I was 15, and there are only a few small gaps where I wasn’t playing in a band, and I don’t have the drive to figure something else out.”

While this history has afforded Robinson a greater sense of appreciation for the moment, the musician is the first to admit that experience doesn’t mean that he has all the answers. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“I mean, we’re all just trying to figure it out, and I’m okay with that,” he said. “You know, you’re picking up your kid, and you’re meeting these other parents and having these deep conversations with people you wouldn’t necessarily be having conversations with if you weren’t parents. … And, yeah, you do start to realize everyone’s struggling to figure out how to be a mom or dad, or even how to be a human being. … And I think a lot of what I’m trying to get across in what I’m writing is that I don’t have it figured out, and I don’t have the answers.”