Artist Profile: Chico Romano

Chico Romano, the genre-bending band led by former Professor Caveman frontman Rob Romano, was born Ship of Theseus-style from the ashes of the infamous New Jersey indie band and, since its inception, has served as a unique creative vehicle for Romano’s sonic whims, carving out a unique lane with each individual addition to its slowly growing catalog. It is a distinct project from Professor Caveman, yet, for fans of the band, it also serves as an interesting continuation of the musical ideas that Romano injected into the original group.

As a child, Romano always knew he had the natural bent of a performer. He was fascinated by Michael Jackson, and, when he would go visit his family, they would throw change at him as he imitated MJ’s signature dances.

As he grew older, this evolved into an interest in the budding New Jersey garage scene. Although he played guitar when he was younger, his engrossment did not fully materialize until he picked up the bass for the first time.

At the time, his friends were looking to start a band, and there were two bass players among their close group. This inspired a sense of competitiveness in Romano, and every day when he got home from school, he would go immediately to his room and try to learn a freshly complex bassline in order to outdo his counterpart.

The result was rapid improvement on his instrument, and, by the time he entered his early high school years, his older friends affectionately referred to him as “The Prodigy”. 

He spent his teenage years jamming in garages and basements, not only earning his musical chops in these settings but also widening his knowledge of music as a whole:

“I think a lot of cats miss out on this experience nowadays because people go to school for music… I was very fortunate. I might've had some guitar lessons, but I really learned a lot from jamming in garages and bedrooms and was put onto so much radical music that I maybe wouldn't have heard if I played in a jazz band.”

When he went to college at Rutgers, he ultimately opted not to study music because of his lack of formal training. He instead went the route of visual art, but music quickly found him again upon his arrival to campus.

He ingrained himself into the house show scene in New Brunswick, and it was there that he met the two other members who would eventually form Professor Caveman’s original lineup.

After playing punk-influenced music for years in his hometown, he couldn’t help but be swept up in the excitement of the genre-incorporation Professor Caveman was undertaking at their inception. Their shows were infamously wild, and their experimentations even more so.

“I think what excited me about it was that everyone was playing a certain kind of indie rock, and it was nowhere aligned with the music I like. I like funk and Latin music and R&B and all this stuff. It’s not even like we were really doing that sh*t, but we would do, [for example], a math song with a merengue Latin rhythm section or something. I think it gave me a scope of what other bands were doing [at the time].”

The band found great success both within and outside of their local scene, releasing five studio albums and a live project, but as time went on, the original three-piece lineup wore thin. Whereas they began with the mission to achieve as much as possible with just their three instruments, they began to add more members as the years went on in order to pursue a bigger sound. As the other two original members of the band faded away, Romano felt that it was time for a fresh start.

He renamed the band Chico Romano in an effort to both signify a new sonic direction for the group and to recapture some of the original spark he had felt upon the formation of Professor Caveman.

“That was my existential crisis… It's cool to see a new band, and they're so good, but you don't know that they actually have all this experience. They feel like they're a new band. So I wanted it to feel like that; I wanted it to feel like a new band. Who knows? I might do it again.”

In opposition to Professor Caveman’s original stripped-down lineup, Romano wanted this new project to be maximal, bringing in an assortment of instruments to expand the range of sounds that were open to him.

While their early stuff is very jazz-centric, as a result of the jazz musicians he brought in to supplement the lineup, Chico Romano very quickly took an indie bent, infusing all of the genres that Romano had grown up loving into its sound.

Their debut album under their new moniker, Making a Racket, was composed, arranged, and performed entirely by Romano, taking a newer, softer spin on the sound he had already begun developing. Its title is a reference to Romano’s limited experience on the drums, and the resultant slippages in rhythm and time, in the context of a quote from Richard Hale’s autobiography.

He rejoiced and revelled in the slight imperfections the album was founded upon, and it, in many ways, served as Chico Romano’s first distinct departure from its roots in Professor Caveman.

Now, as he weighs the various paths forward he has envisioned for the band (he has ideas for four EPs lined up for 2026), he hopes to continue this transition, sculpting an ever-evolving project through which his creative desires can be exercised.

“I see it getting more radical. I'm trying to make softer music and then heavier music; [I want to] exaggerate everything more. I felt like this recent one [Making a Racker] was a collection of songs that felt kind of cohesive aesthetically. But I see it changing. I see it changing definitely.”