On the long roads somewhere off the St. Georges exit from 95 South, the sun was fading and the sky had the gray look of winter chill to it. On either side were stables and wide-open spaces occupied by big, comfortable houses, with blankets of fresh-fallen snow whiting out the landscape. It didn’t seem the appropriate setting to be meeting the gadget-laced electronic-rock duo Revolution, I Love You—this was the stuff of campfires and acoustic guitars, not drum machines and ProTools. As it turned out, it wasn’t the appropriate setting at all. I was lost.

Eventually, I made my way to a house in Townsend—or Middletown; the towns blur together—where 25-year-olds Rob Lindgren and Jason (Jay) Reynolds, Middletown High grads and the members of Revolution, I Love You, have a makeshift studio in Lindgren’s parents’ basement. The space here made more sense: instruments both traditional and improvised (a trash can as drum set); Reynolds’ re-upholstered amp next to an old piano; a couple of computers; a rack filled with CDs and VHS movies; cartons of soda; some alcohol; shelving units and furniture.

The set-up is temporary. Lindgren and Reynolds are in the process of relocating to the Roxborough neighborhood of northwest Philadelphia to begin the second level of their career. “That’s been the plan for the last year and a half,” Lindgren says on the phone in early January, a few days before we meet up. “We hope that by the end of next year, we feel comfortable and we’re really situated in Philly and people know who we are. It’s the next stepping stone before going to somewhere like New York, where it’s far more serious and competitive.”

Reynolds says, “It’s an interesting and experimental place. There’s a scene up there, as far as house shows, that makes it more of a personal preference for us.”

Lindgren puts it this way: “I had a really encouraging conversation with one of the guys from American Buffalo”—last year’s O&A Musikarmageddon winner—“when he came out to our show at Home Grown. He said, ‘You can’t just go up there and play some straight-up rock ’n’ roll. Nobody gets down with it. Nobody’s into it. They want some weird electro s—t.’ I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Oh. Sounds good for us.’”

As Revolution, I Love You, Lindgren and Reynolds have brought something fresh and exciting to the local-music scene. The band’s name comes from a piece of graffiti written during the French Revolution of 1968, and the idea of an international exchange—American rock with European rhythm—is never too far behind. (For proof, see the band’s vivid cover of the Cure’s “Lullaby,” or the song “The Prettiest Feather, or the Straightest Quill?”) Lindgren is the group’s lead singer. Reynolds plays keyboards. They both play guitars, make beats, write lyrics, come up with song titles, and, in a live setting, man a loop station—a system of synced guitar pedals that allows users to grab phrases, make them repeat, and layer other phrases on top of them. “Jay has a delay pedal that does it, and I have a dedicated pedal for it,” Lindgren says, “so between the two of them, we’re able to get that thing tapping into this f—ked-up wall of sound.” Things bounce off each other in a way that feels intentional, but the elements don’t necessarily belong together. If you were to add a string player to the mix, or a trumpeter, or an opera singer, well, that would be fine, too. The party’s big enough for everyone.

“I think of it as, ‘We write pop songs,’” Lindgren says. “But the arrangements are a little odd. We mangle them a little bit. We put weird IDM beats under them. We give them noisy guitar parts. We take something that would otherwise be catchy and fun and make it mildly unlistenable.”

In early 2009, RILY (also R,ILY, for grammar’s sake) released an EP, Noise. Pop. Deathray. (which includes “Lullaby” and “The Prettiest Feather”), then began hitting the live circuit, bringing with them the sense of adventure they apply to their music. One show last July at Kelly’s Logan House saw them setting up the stage—by no means a large space—with the resourceful imagination belonging to community-theater groups and college freshmen. Realizing, perhaps, that people playing machines isn’t everyone’s idea of a performance, Lindgren and Reynolds upped the fun factor, incorporating items onstage you might find at a yard sale: a table and tablecloth that have seen better days, a lamp, some flowers.

“We used to talk a lot in college about what it means to make music, and why,” Lindgren says one day in the basement before the band’s move to Philly. (Lindgren was a cultural-studies major at Towson. Reynolds studied history at UD. Neither graduated, although Reynolds has plans to finish eventually.) “There was a need to do more than just say, ‘We love these bands. Let’s make music that sounds like them.’ There was a post-modern-play thing happening, like a mish-mash of everything we do. If you look at any artform now, a lot of it is just a mix-up of everything that’s happened in the last 200 years at various points. In pop music, it’s the last 50 or 60 years. What we do is put a little bit of everything together. There are some grungy guitars, but then there’s electronics and beats.”

It’s here, in RILY’s love of percussion—specifically, the kind of IDM blasts that were the calling card of Aphex Twin and Atari Teenage Riot in the ’90s—that things become interesting, and where RILY wrestles themselves from the pack. Not since the Metrosexuals a few years ago (who later became Blackswan until disbanding recently) has electronic-based rock been at the forefront of so many local-music discussions.

Last April, RILY graced the cover of Spark and won the magazine’s award for Best Breakout Artist. They made appearances at the Delaware Music Awards and on Radio 104.5 FM, WSTW’s Graffiti Radio, and Ocean City’s WOCM. That fall, they performed during the inaugural Wilmington Fringe arts festival. In January, they picked up four nominations in WSTW’s annual Homey Awards, which honor local musicians. Last month, they were invited to play the 14th Millennium Music Conference in Harrisburg, Pa.

It was a big year for two guys who’d never played the songs on their EP live until they started booking shows. The first was in late March last year. “The way we tend to approach things,” Reynolds says, “is we don’t worry about how we’re going to pull it off live, because that’s just a problem we’ll have to solve later. When we write or record a song, we do it however we feel we need to do it, in order to make the recording the strongest.”

To hear an early version of RILY, try finding Lindgren’s and Reynolds’ previous band Radiowhore’s only album, Some Sort of Poison. A well-produced, if mostly derivative, release, Some Sort of Poison fashions itself as an alt.rock canvas that wants to be dangerous, too—you can hear Alice in Chains, and the Smashing Pumpkins, and Marilyn Manson, and Tool. But the album was made in 2006, long after the alt.rock hybrid had run its course. Listening now, there are flashes of welcome weirdness: One of the interludes is nothing more than a light jazz number, a U-turn from the heavily processed guitars that saturate the rest of the album.

One song, “Shiver Shake Chills,” led Lindgren and Reynolds to think they might be onto something, should they ever split off on their own. “We’d always been the principal writers, and we weren’t getting a lot of input,” Reynolds says. “So we started thinking, ‘What if it was just us?’”

“Shiver Shake Chills,” Reynolds says, is the moment when the two began trusting each other musically. “Rob was doing just the basic guitar part”—Reynolds recreates the song’s opening through da-da-das—“and I’m thinking, ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” He went with it anyway. “Now it’s one of the only songs I still like, and it made me realize that Rob works differently than me. I work section by section. But Rob hears everything in his head at the same time.”

Disagreements with the band’s drummer led to Radiowhore’s demise, and Lindgren and Reynolds began sketching out ideas for a new act, one with a heavy emphasis on beats. Regardless of what they would sound like, the two decided from the start that they would retain tight control over everything, from creative moves to business plans.

“We’ve got a pretty clear vision for what we want and how we think it should sound,” Lindgren says. “The surface qualities of the music—not the content, but the style and the production—that means just as much to the music as the words and the notes. Style is the important thing, and how you play with that is the statement you’re making.”

The move to Philly is meant to introduce that style to a wider audience and market. They’ve worked out what they call “a whole other route” that doesn’t involve dealing with a label at all: Do well on their own, get distribution, bank the money, hire a team. Though brave, it’s not rocket science, and other, bigger bands have been adopting a similar strategy for years. (Prince and Death Cab for Cutie come to mind.) But RILY may become one of the first serious local acts to turn its art into a legitimate commerce machine, compatible with the new world the music industry has found itself in. “Labels are like banks,” Lindgren says.

“They’re going to loan you money, and then they’re going to tell you where to spend it and who to spend it with. And you have to pay it back. It’s always their money. Going the indie route, the only difference is you have to come up with the capital first. You need it to get the CDs made, to do promotion, to do a college-radio campaign. Once we have distribution, we can play a lot more, come up with our own capital, do our own releases, and hire our own people. There’s no reason we need a label.”

By keeping everything close to home—from management and marketing to the music itself—RILY hope to avoid the sort of entanglements that have slowed the progress of other local artists: the communication breakdown that’s prevented American Buffalo from releasing their long-awaited Western Approaches album, for example, or the Crash Motive’s sour experience with Wind-Up Records.

It’s always been this way, long before Lindgren and Reynolds formed RILY. “The first time we recorded anything, we went into a studio in New Jersey,” Lindgren says. “We were like, ‘We could do this.’ So the next time, instead of spending $800 recording a demo, we saved our money and bought Pro Tools. We’ve been using it since we were 18. Everything is recorded here. It’s all DIY.”

It permeates the band’s releases and release schedule as well. They don’t talk about full-length albums, favoring instead the idea of annual EPs. “There’s a certain concentration of idea that you can do there,” Reynolds says. “We have an unbelievable backlog of material to work from, but as far as making it strong as a unit, I think this is the right format. We want to maximize what the EP can be, not just put it out because we didn’t have enough songs for an album.”

“We can keep it really consistent,” Lindgren says. “We don’t have to feel like we have to show every bit of who we are. We can record and release a new EP every year, all while working a 40-hour-a-week day job. That’s the goal—to be always putting out music. That’s hard to do if we’re talking about doing a 50-minute album every year.”

Rily's next EP, We Choose to Go to the Moon—the title is from a JFK quote about space travel—is expected to be out this summer, and it’s informed by the evolution the band underwent once they started doing shows last year. “We knew some things would be different,” Reynolds says of going back into the studio to record the new material, but they had no idea it would be so drastic. “The live sound was a lot more cohesive,” Lindgren explains. “It didn’t sound like a rock band and then a drum machine. It was more like one unit.” As of now, seven songs are slated to make the cut. A few others were written and performed live but got scrapped, and another song “is finished,” Lindgren says, “but we decided it’ll fit better on the next release.”

The songs on the new EP are “a little more earnest, a little more honest,” Lindgren says, aiming for something “organic” while still relying on synth-based structures. Lindgren cues up one of the songs on the band’s laptop, an untitled track with a tension-building intro, a thick bass-beat, and the refrain, “Can’t do it on my own.” Much more melodic than most of Noise. Pop. Deathray., the song reminded me of parts of The Fragile, the ambitious Nine Inch Nails album that’s found a small but devoted audience in the 10 years since its release.

“Dude,” Lindgren says, lighting up. “There was a period where all I listened to was that and Kid A.”

The two records comprise an interesting pair. Released at the height of the retail boom that carried the music industry into the millennium, as well as right before widespread file-sharing led to  decline, the albums are the works of artists—Trent Reznor and Radiohead—who’ve turned their backs on the old way of doing things.

“Record labels do one thing well: huge bands,” Lindgren says. “They don’t do development anymore. They’ve figured out how to make so much money off one huge hit from one huge band.” As a result, Lindgren says, “The other processes they had for developing smaller bands fell by the wayside. They don’t do it anymore, which is part of why they’re falling apart. That, and not adapting to the fact that no one buys CDs.”

All of which leads Revolution, I Love You to think that the iron is hot for indie bands, electronic or otherwise, to strike. “Ten, 15 years ago, we would’ve tried to go our own way,” Lindgren says. “And honestly, the climate didn’t exist for that to work as well. Even with the complete failure of the music industry, right now has got to be the best time to be a musician, ever.”