Roomer Staircase Made of Rope

Berlin-based dreamrock trio Roomer are back on Squama with their second album Staircase Made of Rope.
Staircase Made of Rope is a loose thing, and they'll tell you so themselves. Where 2025’s Leaving It All to Chance arrived with the assurance of songs long road-tested, the new album was made the other way around: in the studio first, often sprung from improvisations, mostly in single takes the band saw no reason to second-guess.
Here are three best friends spending time together, and Roomer is what fills the awkward silences. Each its own constellation, Ronja Schößler with her solo records on Unguarded, Ludwig Wandinger's polymath drumming and ambient work on Caterina Barbieri's light-years imprint, Luka Aron with a recent 2025 Venice Biennale commission, something happens when the three come together: a return to the music they grew up on, seen now through the prism of a decade spent in musical experimentation.
And so the record does sound like the places it was made in: a childhood home couch in summer, where the title track was committed to tape between walks; the concrete stairwell adjoining Squama's Munich headquarters, where the drums were tracked; assorted bedrooms, whatever happened to be at hand , guitars re-amped through megaphones and old dictaphones. Their second album for the label is something of an inside job: much of it was engineered by Squama's own Martin Brugger.
Lurching, cutting hard between far-apart states, the record moves the air in a zigzag. It can bury a melody under a front of distortion, every frequency fighting for the same square inch until they fuse into one mass felt in the body before the ear sorts it out, and a moment later drop to a whisper, a first take left almost untouched. Harmonies arrive too strange to name and then refuse to resolve. A bleakness shows up fierce and slightly unhinged, its chorus epic in the smallest possible way, cymbals held back at the exact moment they might have crashed.
The diaristic directness of the previous record has given way to something more elliptical, writing that circles a feeling rather than naming it, suspicious of the vocabulary it has been handed. Comfort is offered, then refused. It reads less as heartbreak than as the flat, clear state of mind that follows.
So the title Staircase Made of Rope turns out to be the only instruction the album gives: a way up that asks for both hands, with no railing.