Inside an inconspicuous brown house in Arden Hills, Brad Matala has turned his home into a state-of-the-art recording studio. For local rockers Rogue Royal, Matala’s studio offers a space to transfer their on-stage chops to the digital realm.

When you walk in through the side door by the garage, you are first greeted by a room with guitars and other equipment hanging from the walls and a punching bag in the center of the room. One could walk in and think this room is the DIY recording studio, but walking a bit further into the basement reveals where the bulk of the work is done. 

Red rugs line the floor of the two-story addition at the rear of the house, warming up the atmosphere for an array of speakers, amps and recording equipment. A drum kit and piano juxtapose a few couches, the odd potted plant and even a driving net to practice your golf swing. Matala added the 22-foot-tall addition to his home in October 2023, about seven years after he bought his house. He said having a large studio space was a key factor in the purchase. A balcony looms over the studio and leads back into the core of the house. 

The room attached to the balcony is full of computer monitors, lights, speakers and just about any other equipment you could ask for in a recording studio. At one point, there was even the tape machine that recorded part of the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, but Matala sold that so it wouldn’t collect dust next to his newer equipment.

Every Tuesday, Rogue Royal can be found in the studio practicing their songs, huddled around a computer perfecting a recording for a YouTube video or just hanging out.

Clay Deters, the band’s frontman, said musicians need to cater to social media to break out in the modern day. Though he hates being called a content creator, he said Matala has been invaluable in building their online presence. Where the band would stay in the rocker-purist mindset of solely focusing on the music, Matala shepherds them to the necessary detour of self-promotion and content creation.

“Brad’s good about getting us out of our comfort zone and making videos that we wouldn’t make otherwise,” Deters said. “If it were up to us, it would just be guitar videos, just drum videos, you know? Just nerdy music stuff that only nerdy music people like. He’s good about being like, ‘Alright, guys, that’s cool and all, but how do we get the general population to want to like you guys?’” 

Matala described himself as the band’s content creator and “video guy.” Over 100 artists have used Matala’s studio to record or practice, including St. Paul band The Limns and Chris Hawkey (of KFAN’s Power Trip Morning Show) and his aptly named Chris Hawkey Band.

“Brad’s the kind of guy where he always is wanting to try new things and do new things,” Deters said. “The situation we found ourselves in with him is we’ve almost been like guinea pigs for a lot of stuff.”

Rogue Royal started working with Matala in 2017 when they were still called The Issue. Deters started an apprenticeship under Matala at one of his old studios in 2015, but Matala said it was clear that Deters was more interested in being a performer than a producer or an engineer.

“He [Deters] had just dropped out of college and didn’t know what to do,” Matala said. “So I was like, ‘Why don’t you start recording your album and get a band formed?’”

Origins

Deters and bassist Kyle Rutten formed the band in 2015 with their friend Avery Wiese. Deters had recently graduated high school and Rutten was in his senior year when Deters asked if Rutten would be the bassist for his yet-to-be-named band.

“I was like, ‘I’ve never played, but that sounds pretty fun,’” Rutten said.

Deters said he met Rutten playing hockey when he was 4 years old. Rutten taught himself to play the guitar a year before he joined the band, but the bass was a new venture. Their first gig was opening for Wiese’s uncle’s band, and without a name, they performed for one night as the Gitsums.

“Avery, our previous guitar player, his uncle’s band was playing in town, and they said we could play for like 45 minutes, and they literally made a big sign, and they just came up with a name,” Rutten said.

Matala said Deters had a better network of music around him than he let on. For their “Now or Never” music video, Rogue Royal borrowed a car from the owner of the owner of the Next Door Bar in Deters and Rutten’s hometown of Sauk Centre. Everything was going great, the band said, until they accidentally crashed it into one of the other cars they were using for the shoot. Deters said the owner was very understanding, but he set the bent bumper on stage at the bar the next time they performed there. 

The band renamed themselves Rogue Royal in 2023 because the previous name was too similar to other bands. One of these bands was Issues, a metal band from Atlanta that broke up earlier this year.

“The first time I went to Warped Tour was a year after being in the band. Then I saw Issues there, and I was like, ‘What the heck is this s—?’ And I was like, ‘Low key, like f— those guys,’” Rutten said. “Years later, I was like, ‘Actually, damn, those guys slap hard.’”

Not to mention the now-defunct group, Issues, broke up in large part due to accusations of sexual misconduct against their frontman, according to Metal Injection. It’s safe to say our boys in Arden Hills are the superior band.

A changing lineup

The band had two drummers in their early days but landed on their third and final man on the sticks in 2017 with Collin Gibbs.

Gibbs’ bandmates said he was meant to be a rockstar. Until recently, Gibbs said he was rocking a handlebar mustache that went down to his nipples.

Gibbs was introduced to the band while drumming for Cities Never Sleep. Deters knew one of Gibbs’ bandmates through Matala. Rogue Royal (still The Issue at the time) asked Gibbs to record some music with them as they were struggling to find enough time to record with their own drummer. After a night of Deters and Gibbs recording music and drinking whiskey until 3 a.m., Gibbs jumped ship.

“I was doing a lot of things because I was the guy who was in the room,” Gibbs said. “This was more like the music that I wanted to write.”

The band struggled during COVID. They were booked to play South by Southwest before it was canceled, and a few months later Wiese decided to leave the band. 

A couple of people filled in on lead guitar following Wiese’s departure, and eventually, they landed on Collin Johnson as a long-term replacement. With two Collins in the band, Johnson went by CJ and Gibbs went by Riphphque (pronounced RIFF-KEY.)

Enter groupie-turned-guitar-player Monty Philipp, who started hanging around the band at their shows and making friends with the guys before he was brought on as a rhythm guitarist in late 2022.

“We had talked about even just like, potentially adding a fifth member of the band, just adding a rhythm guitar player to the band so I could focus on just singing and having a guy play rhythm guitar parts,” Deters said. “And as we were hanging out with Monty more, we were like, ‘F—, Monty would be the perfect guy to play in the band with us.’”

Not too long after Philipp joined the band, Johnson left to focus on other projects, leaving Philipp to take over as lead guitar.

Philipp grew up in a music family and attended the St. Paul Conservatory for the Performing Arts in high school, but left the school due to failing grades. He said he was acing all of his music classes, but he wasn’t motivated for the other classes.

“So then they nixed me from that school,” Philipp said. “I went back to regular high school and decided that I was going to take the freshmen, sophomore, junior and senior slide and just go home and play guitar every day.”

Philipp said the first band he ever played in was his dad’s band “Chain Lightning,” which he and his older brother joined when he was 15.

For the most part, all of the current members of Rogue Royal (Deters, Rutten, Gibbs and Philipp, if you haven’t been keeping track) have played with each other at one point or another in different bands or side projects before or during their time as Rogue Royal. They even form a country band every summer to play at North Dakota Country Fest called Out of Line consisting of all members of Rogue Royal, plus Deters’ brother Cal.

Rogue Royal and a rush to the throne

While the band is built for the stage, they said it is important that they focus on the content game over the next few months to grow their audience. 

“Put the video up on YouTube. Each song will maybe get a couple thousand views, because, you know, we’re not a big band,” Deters said. “Well, for us to get a couple thousand people to come to a show at the stage where we’re at now, that’s almost impossible.”

A rock band in the time of viral acoustic bedroom sets and hyper-reliance on digital production, Rogue Royal knows their instincts to shred live shows over cultivating a brand online could be a hindrance, but sometimes the call of Rock ‘n’ Roll is too strong.

“We always talk about doing that, and then we fill our calendar full of shows, and we never take time to do that,” Deters said.