‘When She Comes Around’ is the first track to be revealed from No Rome’s highly anticipated debut album ‘It’s All Smiles’, debuting on December 3rd by Dirty Hit.
The visualizer for "When She Comes Around" filmed in Manila, brings a dark, atmospheric vibe that pairs perfectly with track. Rome described the process of creating the song and the video, “I made this song after watching the Bjork live version of her album Vespertine and I wanted to make a song that was heavy on the strings but after days on working on it I eventually brought it to a more guitar driven song. I sent this song to BJ and he came back with something much more than I expected, with more textures and stronger bass sounds and just better structure really and we just went crazy on it.”
The Manila born artist recorded his newest song in a small apartment after the pandemic prevented him returning to London. The album was co-produced by Rome with BJ Burton (Kanye West, Bon Iver, Charli XCX) and George Daniel (The 1975). The track finds No Rome returning to his roots, both in terms of location and influences.
"When She Comes Around" follows the vibe Rome coined as 'Shoegaze R&B.' Vocal lines are indebted to the intense emotions expressed in R&B and run beautifully across highly textured production and instrumentation. Like Kevin Shields, the architect of My Bloody Valentine, No Rome paints with his production, taking straight-forward guitar playing and complicating it with the tools at his disposal.
We can expect the album to have tons of more 'Shoegaze R&B' tracks. Rome wrote and recorded most of the album at night in Manila, and its sound evokes the smeared wonder of a city passing by through a rain-flecked car windshield after dark. It’s an album for quality headphones, to hear every detail and note.
ABOUT NO ROME
Guendoline Rome Viray Gomez childhood prepared him to embrace new ideas about what music could do. Both his parents dabbled in performance: his mother would sometimes sing in nightclubs and his dad would moonlight as a DJ when he wasn’t working his day job as a civil engineer. “Not everybody likes the music their parents play, but my dad had really good taste,” he says. “It’s funny, he wasn’t really into rock but he loved new wave and post-punk. He liked the fast tempo stuff, something you could cry and dance to.” New Order and Naked Eyes rang off in Rome’s childhood home, not too far from where he eventually rented the apartment where he’d record It’s All Smiles.
Rome hadn’t planned on moving back to Manila, where he’d been born and raised, but the pandemic changed things. A festival appearance evolved into an extended stay with his parents, and then Rome, 24, rented a two-bedroom apartment of his own when it became clear he wouldn’t be returning to London, where he’d been living for the last three years, anytime soon. In the extra room he put his drum machines, synthesizers, monitors, and laptop to create the improvised home studio where he recorded his debut album It’s All Smiles, under his moniker No Rome.
