Biography

The Pines of Rome are a slowcore band from Providence, Rhode Island, who've been exploring the frontiers of Cosmic American Music on and off for the past 25 years. The band originally formed in 1997, when the small-but-mighty Providence music scene was reaching an eclectic creative peak, where fuzz pop, psych rock, and noise bands would share the same stage at hallowed venues such as Fort Thunder, AS220, and The Living Room. They recorded their first EP, "A Catholic Western," in 1998 for fledgling Providence label Corleone Records. It sounded like Television covering "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" inside The Large Hadron Collider; a Swiz 7" played on 78. In 1999, they released a full-length, On All Fours, which further pushed genre boundaries: passages of creaky near-silence played on cracked pawn-shop instruments explode into glitchy, full-spectrum thunder, everything haunted with creeping fin de siecle doom. In the summer of 2020, shuttered inside during the pandemic, Derby was inspired to contact his former Pines bandmate, Kolodij, who was living in Ohio at the time. "Everything fell into place immediately, the first time we played again," Kolodij recalls. "It was like we'd never stopped playing. But with all this additional experience under our belts."