For Lawn, becoming a band happened somewhere between the University of Miami music school, an overcrowded living room, and enough house shows to eventually name their first EP after them. House Party Hero captured a period when the indie rock group was still growing into itself, packing dozens of people into 95-degree rooms, and turning those cramped spaces into the places where the foundation for the band’s identity and the community surrounding it was laid.
Now, that foundation is being stretched into something heavier. Lawn’s upcoming music leans further into Midwest emo and hardcore influences, pushing beyond the indie-rock sound of their earlier releases without completely abandoning the energy that shaped them in the first place. The shift feels less like a reinvention than an expansion: louder, more emotionally demanding, and increasingly reflective of a band figuring out what it wants to sound like beyond the environment where it first came together.
At the same time, Lawn is entering a period where growth means more than changing genres or playing bigger rooms. It means deciding what parts of the band’s beginnings deserve to come with them as everything else evolves.
In this World Of conversation, Romeo reflects on the community at the center of Lawn, the creative direction shaping their next project, and what it means to take the band more seriously without losing the closeness, spontaneity, and sense of fun that made people care in the first place.
This interview has been edited for clarity and flow.
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Matilia, World Of: So, before we talk about what Lawn is becoming, what originally brought the four of you together?
Romeo of Lawn: Originally, three of the original members were myself, the bassist who has recently left, and the guitarist. We were in a separate band called Oblivious Puppets, and all of us had our own gripes with that band, and we all independently came to the conclusion of, “We should do our own new thing,” because we still loved music and we still wanted to do it. But after leaving that, we started Lawn, and our bassist was in another band, and they had a really great drummer, Cliff, who is our current drummer still, and we all loved the indie rock sound. I’ve been writing a lot since getting out here, of more emo, Midwest emo stuff, very riffy, or some hardcore stuff. But what really brought us together was just wanting to do something of our own that was brand new. We wanted to really try something different and go for what we were all passionate about instead of just a very standard sound.
World Of: What was the moment that Lawn stopped feeling like four people making songs together and it started to feel like an identity?
Romeo: I would definitely say just playing live together. We met in college at the University of Miami. We all went to the music school there. In our junior and senior years, we would play a lot of house shows, and we just graduated this year. And in that local scene, we were able to find so much, not only community and friends and playing with other artists, but really just each other and our sound.
Our first EP is called House Party Hero, just because of how many of those dang things we did. Miami’s scene is so interesting. It’s not exactly a rock scene, but there’s an underground anywhere you go. So we were able to really find each other, and that’s when it really became not just friends doing music and not just four individuals, but really, as corny as it sounds, a family. We all moved out of Miami to Los Angeles. We flew across the whole country – or some of us drove – to live out here. We’re like brothers at this point.
World Of: If House Party Hero represented one chapter of Lawn, what does this next single represent?
Romeo: I think that this would definitely represent growing up more. We wrote and recorded a lot of that album when most of us were 19, 19 and 20. I’m 22, so it’s really not been that long. But still, I think enough time has really passed, and the song that we’re going to put out next month is probably the heaviest thing I’ve ever written.
It’s a very personal song to me, and it shows that we can really write songs that aren’t just fun songs or experimental sounds, but we can really write heavier topics. I would say that it’s the second chapter for sure, but it’s getting serious in every sense of the term. It’s getting serious because this is now hopefully a full-time career, and also sonically and lyrically, this song is going to be loud and heavy, and there’s a lot of yelling and screaming, and I really push myself vocally. It’s definitely a new sound going forward for us as well.
World Of: How is the creative process and the songwriting process for y’all?
Romeo: We have a pretty good system, which is usually -I almost see it as a factory line where our guitarist Daniel will come up with some sort of riff or chord progression, and then he’ll – he lives currently with our drummer Cliff, and they bounce off each other a bit. Then I will go over to their house, and we’ll sit down. I’ll add lyrics, and I’ll probably add either my own guitar part or my own melody. And we just try and work and work. We add a bass part now, and we have it where it goes in a perfect circle until it winds up either back at Daniel or back at me, and then usually the song’s finished.
When we had our old bassist, it would start with Daniel, and then our bassist’s name was Cooper. It would go to Cooper, then it would go to me because the three of us lived together. Cliff would be the final step – adding drums. Then I would finalize lyrics, and the song would be done. We keep the same system now, but with a little more independence for each part since we live farther away.
World Of: How did each of y’all get into music?
Romeo: We all went to college for music, so there was definitely growth there. But we really all got into music…I definitely know that I can say I got into it around middle school; that’s when I started to learn the guitar and really think about my future and what I wanted to do. And I know that I wasn’t very good at much else, so it was, “Okay, this is what I’ll do. This is what I’ll go to college for, because this is the only thing that I really love to do, is music.” I’d always been good enough in classes and good enough in extracurriculars, but to say that I was ever as moved by anything as I was by music would be lying.
I can say for sure our drummer has been playing the drums since he was a very little kid, and he’s played in a bunch of different bands. We found him because he played in a different band. And our guitarist has also played for a very long portion of his life, and he really picked it up heavily in college because I know that he didn’t originally go to the University of Miami for music. I think his freshman year was in a different school, and then he realized, “No, let me really pursue this dream. Let me actually chase this.”
Then I had classes with them, and we were able to all find each other just through…it was a very small community, the music school, so everyone knew everyone. It was almost like a very big high school. It was a little more than a high school and a little less than a full college campus, but we still had our little part, and we were able to all find each other just through having classes together or friends of friends or little things like that. But I think that that’s how we all individually got started on music.
World Of: What did the upcoming single challenge y’all to do creatively that you didn’t have to do previously? I know you said it was heavier.
Romeo: At least I can speak for myself. This song is really – I said before, I rarely come up with the guitar part. That’s usually Daniel’s thing. That’s the initial thought. But this song was my original thought and the chord progression and everything. And it challenged me lyrically to be as emotionally raw as possible and emotionally open as I could be about myself and my feelings.
But it also challenged me to…I do a lot of yelling and screaming vocals on this, and I had to learn how to sing like that without destroying my voice. And then I realized how much I love that sound, and how much we’ve written like that going forward for not only this new single, but also this new project going forward, this new EP that we’re going to hopefully put out by the end of the year.
I think that this just challenged me the most lyrically. It’s a heavy song about a friend of mine who passed away a while ago, and it’s about him and the feelings that have lingered and the pain that it causes to grieve. It’s a love letter, and it’s a sad time, but it’s an honest song. I think that was the most difficult bit, just being honest with myself about what that relationship meant to me and who he was to me. He was like my best friend.
It was the first time – it was in high school, and I wrote 100 songs about it, but none of them ever felt right. And it’s the first time that I was able to, three years later, write the song, and I was able to be like, “Okay, you really agree with everything you’re saying here, and you really mean it this time.” So I think that was the most difficult part, just being that emotionally available.
That kind of honesty marks a pretty significant shift for Lawn. The heavier sound isn’t just about turning up the volume or experimenting with new influences; it’s giving Romeo room to write from places he hadn’t been able to reach convincingly before. And once that door opened, it started shaping more than a single song.
World Of: Beyond the sound itself, what do you want the new side of Lawn to reveal? What do you want the next era to reveal about Lawn?
Romeo: I think that what I would love to reveal is that we’re not just a college band. I think that we really want to show that this is what we love. This is who we are. I would love to be able to experiment with different sounds, and I would love to show just the wide range of things that we can actually do and really achieve.
But I would like to show that we’re not just here to mess around. We’re not here to just be a band that you see at a house party. We will be playing more shows and bigger crowds. But we’re forever grateful for our house party experiences and have nothing but good things to say about them.
I think that we really just have to show this is who we are. This is what we want. We are real. We all moved out here from Miami, but I’m originally from New Jersey, and our drummer is originally from Ohio, and our guitarist is from Miami since birth. But we all really want to prove, like you said again, we’re not individuals, but we’re really a family. We’re really a cohesive unit. We’re a band. So I think that’s what we want to prove going forward, is that we’re serious about this. We really love what we do, and we’re here to rock. We’re here to party, baby.
World Of: As y’all begin to reach new people and enter new rooms, what’s something that you want to take from the house shows into the new spaces that you enter?
Romeo: The number one thing is the community of it. We not only were able to meet new musicians, but just also make new friends. It was such a gift. It was such a blessing to just be able to – we try and do it as much as we can, but we’d usually do it about once a month. We’d have new acts on. We would meet new musicians. New people would show up that weren’t just in the music school. We’d hang up flyers all around campus and all around town. We had professors show up. We had all these different people come to our shows, and I think that we would love to be able to cultivate that here in Los Angeles.
I would love to make a million friends. I would love to know everyone who shows up to our shows regularly, and I would love to see if they like it or if they hate it. I think that the number one thing that I really loved about the house shows was that you’d get 50 to 60 people into our living room, and it was 95 degrees. Everyone was sweating. Everyone was dancing. Everyone was going nuts. But no one was popular. Everyone was friends. I would love to be able to do that out here. That’s what I really want to take with us from that college era, is friends, just community going forward. I think it is very important to us.
It’s easy to romanticize house shows because of the sweat, chaos, and proximity of it all, but what Romeo keeps coming back to isn’t really the living room itself. It’s what happened inside it! Lawn had created a space where showing up for the music could turn into knowing the band, knowing the people beside you, and eventually feeling like you were part of something. So as the rooms change, preserving that feeling feels just as important as filling them.
World Of: What is it that you want people who come to see your shows to leave feeling?
Romeo: I would love to have people feel like they really just had a good time. I know that’s a pretty basic answer, but we do more than just music in our shows. We try to do crowd interaction, and we would have, at the shows that we would play at our house – we didn’t only do house shows; we did a decent amount of venue stuff – but the house shows, I think, are really what made us stand out a little more.
We would do crowd interaction. We would have an Xbox plugged in behind us that people would play Skate on and people would play games on. I would edit together videos for show visuals in the background that we would project onto our wall, and people would mosh. We had a kid crowd surf one time, which was very interesting because it’s a place with a ceiling that’s pretty low. We had to carry them pretty low.
But I think that crowd interaction, that was our big thing. I would love for people to leave going, “I had such a fun time, not just with their music, but with them as personalities, as characters on the stage, as well as musicians that I listen to.” We take the performance aspect into account, and we take that pretty seriously because it’s a super fun bit. We love to play live. It’s our favorite thing.
World Of: How would you want to maintain that closeness as you grow your audience?
Romeo: As much as I would love to know every single person in a crowd, if we were to grow our audience to 1,000-person venues, and if I could name everybody, that would be cool. But I know that’s unrealistic.
We live in the digital age. We have communities online, and we DM our fans, and we communicate with them. We actually became pretty close friends with a bunch of people that would show up just because they would reach out to us through the Instagram DMs and be like, “Hey, that was a great set. Thanks for the shirt,” or, “Thanks for the experience,” or, “Thanks for inviting us to the house shows. Super fun.” And then we’d stay in touch.
I would love to be able to cultivate the fan base digitally, and I would love to be able to have everyone talk to us. We would maybe do it on Discord or whatever, but a community app is, I think, a super great thing to have, and it’s a wonderful tool to have in the digital age.
World Of: What’s something you’ve learned about people just from watching how they interacted at your shows?
Romeo: I think what I definitely learned, because we have a mostly pretty young fan base, is I learned just that people are still looking for this. People still love live music, and as much as things like COVID shut down live shows for a while, or things like AI threaten musicians, I think that – we would play at a venue that we would frequent in Miami, this place called Tea and Poets, and it was in this mall called Sunset Plaza, I think, or Sunset Place Plaza. Most of the stores there were closed down. There was an AMC and a bookstore and a bunch of random other little shops that looked like fronts for other things, and then this place, Tea and Poets.
It made me feel a little old, but the first time that we played there, the crowd was almost entirely high school kids that were all goth, and they all had the white face paint makeup on and the black hair and the baggy jeans. And I was like, “Man, I remember doing this as a kid.” I was 21, 22, and I was like, “I was young once.” But it made me realize, “Kids still go to malls.” I was like, “That’s really a wonderful thing.”
And it made me realize, this is still out there. People still want to go to live music, even if it’s only 30 people. They’re still so passionate about it that, as much as people in the industry or people online will tell you, “It’s all about the social media following. It’s all about the videos you’re posting. This is 100% what it is,” that’s still very important, and I still respect that. But what I’ve learned is just so much of it is still there in person.
We love playing in person. We love meeting people in person. It’s human. We’re social creatures. We love to get out there, and we love to just have that community of young people or people your age or people not your age. Again, I was older than the crowd of high schoolers, but I still realized they’re all here for each other. They’re all here for each other, and then they’re all here for the music on top of it.
So that’s one thing that I definitely took away: people still want to see live music, even if the industry and the world of music is changing. There are fundamental truths about it that I don’t think will ever change.
For a band entering an industry where artists are constantly told to think about reach, algorithms, and what performs online, those small rooms have given Lawn proof that even in the digital age, it’s the live shows that still matter most.
Thirty people choosing to physically show up can mean something that a number on a screen can’t quite replicate. And for Romeo, seeing younger listeners continue seeking those spaces only reinforces that live music still offers something technology hasn’t managed to replace: the feeling of actually being there together.
World Of: If somebody walks into one of your shows and they know absolutely nothing about you and your band, what do you hope they walk out knowing?
Romeo: I hope that they walk out knowing that we’re passionate. I hope they walk out knowing that it’s more than just the music to us. This really is our lives. This is what we love, and to be able to walk away, even if they only see 10, 20 minutes of the show, they walk in late or whatever, I hope that their takeaway is, “Here is a group that is in love with what they do. Here’s someone that they might not even 100% know what they’re doing, and that’s okay.”
I hope that I never fully know what I’m doing, but I hope they can see that we’re so passionate about it that it almost overrides that initial thing. It almost overrides maybe the slight uncertainty of knowing where you are.
World Of: Who are some of your biggest musical inspirations?
Romeo: Bands like Title Fight are huge to us. Marianne, Modern Baseball, Slint. Bands like Oakwood are huge for us. Red House Painters are big, but also a band like Hum is really cool as well. But I listen to a lot of Steely Dan and ABBA, a lot of hip-hop music, a lot of Westside Gunn, a lot of Earl Sweatshirt, Mike, Neonte, Clips, all these people.
It’s a wide range of personal influences, but I would say what is our sound, especially going forward, a lot of bands like Oakwood, Title Fight, that band Marianne is really big for us. So it’s a lot of Midwest emo stuff or hardcore stuff that is really our main sonic influences going forward. The stuff that we have out was certainly more indie rock, and while we still love that, everything that will be coming out is a little different than what we have. But we’re very excited for it. It’s what we want to go with going forward.
World Of: Can you tell me anything about the EP?
Romeo: The EP is probably going to be around five songs. We hope to put it out at the end of the year. I know that we have this song coming out in August. We might put out another song during the fall, maybe closer to winter, but I don’t want to make any promises based on rollout and what have you.
We would love to get this EP out by either the end of the year or the beginning of next year. We have everything recorded. Everything is written and fully done. We’ve mixed it 1,000 times, and we are hoping that the 1,001st time is the final time that we have to mix this thing. But we’re working with a friend of ours that we went to college with, who’s going to be doing the final, final changes to everything, and then we’ll be confident in putting it out.
We’re still aiming for a late August release date on this first new single, and then an end-of-year release date for this EP. And I think that we could do that. Again, five tracks, all of them are cultivating the sound that we have been writing since getting out here for the past month, and all of them are closest to the sound that we really appreciate in music going forward.
World Of: Some artists are really particular about what they put out, and others just release constantly. Which one are you guys?
Romeo: I think that we’re definitely more particular. I would love to be more constantly releasing things going forward, but that requires studio time and either making our own setup, which is probably what’s going to happen, or paying for studio time, which is expensive.
But we would love to be releasing more consistently. I know that it’s been about a year since we put out our last song, and it was November of last year, so really eight months, but we would really love to put out stuff more consistently. But we take our time with everything, and if that’s who we are, then I’m sorry to all the Lawn fans, but that’s who we’re gonna be. We want to give the best.
That willingness to wait stands out because Lawn has plenty of reasons to rush. They’re in a new city, developing a new sound, sitting on finished music, and trying to establish themselves beyond the scene that first knew them. But if this next era is meant to prove anything, taking the time to make it feel right seems just as important as getting the music out at all. The question now is what happens when they finally get to bring it out into the world.
World Of: As the next chapter begins, what are you most excited for Lawn to experience that you guys haven’t experienced yet?
Romeo: Definitelyplaying in front of more people, bigger crowds, and the fact that venues here are a lot nicer than venues in Miami. Not saying the venues in Miami were bad, but we went to one place that had a real sound system in it, and that blew our minds. Playing in a house, as much as we tried to put something nice together, you can only do so much in your own living room. So, I think playing new venues, meeting new artists, working with new artists – if it’s collaboration or if it’s just playing on the same bill together – we’re really the most excited about just getting out into the West Coast. Building an audience here and making new friends and fans here. I think that’s what we’re most excited for in our next chapter.
For Lawn, that next chapter is less about leaving the house-show era behind than seeing how far the spirit of it can travel. The rooms may get bigger, and the opportunities may look different on the West Coast, but the band’s excitement still comes back to the same things: playing live, meeting people, finding collaborators, and building a community around the music.
If House Party Hero documented where Lawn first found its footing, what comes next seems poised to test how much of that intimacy and energy they can carry into a much larger world.
Lawn’s next single is expected later this summer, with a five-track EP currently planned for the end of the year or early next year. Be sure to keep an eye out for their next release!
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