Dream Robbery wrote “The Game” in five minutes, and had been carrying it for years
The setup reads like a scene from a film nobody would believe: a desk, a glass of whiskey, Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space turning on the record player, and nothing else in the room but a fountain pen, paper and an acoustic guitar. By the band’s account, “The Game” arrived in about five minutes.
Five minutes is how long it took to write down. The material is older than that. The song’s author works as a frontline 999 ambulance worker, a job that keeps the temporary nature of life within arm’s reach, and “The Game” is built around the argument that love outlasts it. That is the whole subject, and the song never looks away from either half of it. It moves between freedom, memory and loss with a grit that suits a writer who has seen what he’s writing about.
The band’s response to the song was to leave it alone. Dream Robbery, a trio from Yeovil in Somerset, recorded it as the instruments and voices sounded in the room, with no trimming and no double tracking. Distortion still runs through it, serrated and psychedelic, but the vocal sits where it fell. “A true reflection of my life and my personal belief,” the band say. “Honesty and my total transparency.”
That approach runs through the whole project. “The Game” belongs to a five-single collection recorded across five days at Mill Farm Studios and mastered by Grammy Award-winning engineer Shawn Joseph, which gives the songs a shared room as well as a shared mood. The trio only formally became Dream Robbery in 2022, but they have spent more than a decade playing together, and it shows in how little the arrangements need to explain themselves. Their lineage is the alt-90s, with Spiritualized the obvious touchstone and The Verve and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club close behind. A.&R Factory’s Amelia Vandergast tipped them to steal the scene, and wondered who knew melancholy could sound this lush.
There is a case to be made that a band recording this plainly is making a point about the rest of the field. Next year they add a synth and keys player and head back to the studio. First comes October, and a run of shows in South Korea, where a song written alone at a desk will be played to rooms full of strangers.
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