With lost tracks and a vinyl reissue, the cult LA band gets a well-earned revival. Bryan Ling takes us back…

The music scene in Los Angeles circa the early 2000s was a fever dream of sound and sweat, a wild convergence of youth and yearning. It was centered around a band called IMA Robot, whose jagged rhythms and frenetic energy pulsed through the city’s veins like an electric current. Their music was raw, unpolished, and alive, a reflection of the streets they roamed and the clubs they filled.

The venues—Dragonfly, The Roxy, Viper Room, Club Lingerie, and the Troubadour—were sanctuaries for the restless. More than buildings, they were sweaty temples where the faithful gathered under dim lights to worship at the altar of indie rock.

To step into an IMA Robot show was to abandon pretense and plunge headlong into chaos. With no glowing screens to distract you, no cell phones raised like shields between the audience and the moment, the crowd shook, bodies pressed close. The air hung heavy with cigarette smoke and tasted like vodka cranberry. Fashion was loud and unapologetic — tight jeans, thrifted jackets, neon hair streaks that shimmered in the light like fireflies in a jar. It wasn’t just music; it was culture, a dawn for forward-thinking kids who danced on the edge of something they couldn’t quite name.

There was beauty in its recklessness. The sound of IMA Robot — lead vocalist and songwriter Alex Ebert, Timmy “The Terror” Anderson on guitar, Justin Meldal-Johnsen on bass, Joey Waronker on drums, and Oliver Goldstien on keyboards — was like LA itself, chaotic and immediate, disjointed yet somehow whole. Alex’s lyrics spoke to the disillusionment of a generation caught between dreams and reality, their performances a riotous celebration of life lived on the margins. Music felt particularly urgent. Every chord struck like lightning bolt and every lyric wailed truths too raw to ignore.

When the idea of reissuing IMA Robot’s 2010 album Another Man’s Treasure came up, it gave me a chance to go back and spend time with these songs again — songs that were a big part of my early adulthood. Listening to them now, with a bit more distance and perspective, I can see how they fit into the bigger picture. It’s clear now how these tracks pointed toward where Alex’s songwriting was headed.

Bands rose and fell across the 2000s, some burning bright before fading into obscurity. The clubs themselves either closed their doors or changed hands, their neon signs dimmed. But for those who were there, shoulder to shoulder in the crush of bodies, the sound remains. Like graffiti scrawled on concrete walls, the imprint of those nights lingers. The IMA Robot logo still surfaces here and there, a ghost of its former glory etched into dim spaces. It speaks to more than just a band or a moment; it encapsulates a feeling, a reckless defiance. Those nights felt eternal.

The music itself was a kaleidoscope of influences: punk rock colliding with new wave glam, synthesizers weaving through driving guitar riffs. Ima Robot’s sound embodied this collision, a fusion of grit and glamour that mirrored LA’s restless spirit.

Alex describes LA at the time as lacking a center, calling it “the transitional doldrums of an almost sceneless era. There was the downtown punk stuff and the Smell; backpack rap stuff at Fais Do-Do; the performative ‘rock ‘n roll’ circus of the Sunset Strip. But it all felt like it was spinning in place to us.” 

The scene was alive in ways that feel impossible now. Without the glow of screens to distract them, people were tuned into each other and into the pulse of the room. Conversations spilled over beers; laughter cut through the haze. The music wasn’t just heard; it was felt in the marrow of your bones. It was messy and imperfect but undeniably real.

Somewhere along the way, says Alex, the sound of the city started to change. “If for no other reason than to give props, I’d like to fancifully pin that shift to a show by Wire at the El Rey, on May 4, 2000. The band was already well into their 60s, but packing such fuck-off heat within such angular jags.”

He continues, “We were mesmerized — and we weren’t the only ones. Something was in the air, as the sudden resurgence of Wire and Gang of Four in particular were, I think, the quiet detonators that mainstreamed both electroclash and dancepunk, two genres that could describe, in turns, some of the early Ima Robot catalog, including Black Jettas, STD Dance, and others.”

Me? I was a fan. I had met Alex and Timmy over the years of being out in LA and around the IMA Robot scene — the house parties, the art galleries, and warehouse early mornings.Still, says Alex, the band felt like outliers. “Although we started generating local heat in 1997, we tended to move so freely from style to style that we never found ourselves definitively associated with any one scene. It was a little like being at the nose of a fickle comet. We might have been there first, but you’d have to have been there to know it.”

“We had nothing left to lose. We’d given up on the commercializing of music and were just having fun being independent and unencumbered. Jamming as friends. It’s days like those that make music like this.”

Tim Anderson

Sometime in 2006 or 2007, I was visiting LA from where I was living in New York. I shared a room in the Lower East Side with Steve Aoki and Mark Cobrasnake. We mainly lived in that room, and those dudes would visit when popping into New York for a few days.

Around this time, I ran into Alex in LA. I asked him what he had been up to. I remember Alex saying that he was working on new music, and that he “hadn’t left his apartment in months.” I figured it was IMA Robot music, but Alex said it wasn’t. He wasn’t sure what it was. He invited me over to listen.

When I arrived at the apartment that would later become infamous during the storytelling section at the end of the Magnetic Zeros song “Home,” I quickly realized he probably wasn’t exaggerating about his hermetic life in the apartment. We sat, and he played me the first seven demos that would later become the material for the first Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros album, Up From Below.

Over the next few years (a story for another time), Edward Sharpe was forming, recording, and playing shows. Alex’s focus was on a new chapter, and while Ima Robot hadn’t broken up, each member was busy with their own creative endeavors. As you can imagine, we had no idea what Edward Sharpe was evolving into. Alex spent most of his time working on his new band, but Tim, Filip, and Alex still made time to work on IMA Robot music.

The result ended up being a collection of songs released in 2010, on an album titled Another Man’s Treasure. This was still pre-streaming, so initially it was released on iTunes, Amazon Music, CD, and a limited run of vinyl. It was released on Werewolf Heart — Timmy’s label, which he created with Zach Shields and Ryan Gosling. They all played in the band Deadman’s Bones together and formed a label as a forward-thinking way to develop.

Another Man’s Treasure originally had eight songs and didn’t include “Greenback Boogie” on the physical release. That song is etched in the mind of anyone who has watched Suits, but it was released after the song was licensed for the series. Another Man’s Treasure didn’t get much attention when it was released, mostly because Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros had hit the mainstream. 

I don’t remember exactly when we first started chatting about reissuing Another Man’s Treasure. It seems like ages ago at this point. The good news is that we’ve done it. Alex, Timmy, and Filip have reconnected and gone back into hard drives to find some other really special songs that were recorded during the same time as the ones that made it onto the original release.

We included tracks like “I Don’t Know In French,” “Gangster,” “Peru,” and an extended version of the song “Life Is Short.” We also were able to include “Greenback Boogie” as well as a shorter version of that song for streaming. Through a label that Alex and I created, Community Music, we’ve released a deluxe version of Another Man’s Treasure. In true “keeping it in the family” style, we’ve pressed vinyl through Timmy’s company,   Good Neighbor, which creates an amazing product that is as eco-conscious as a vinyl manufacturer can be at the moment. Of course, I’m going to be a bit biased, but I also trust my taste to be objective, and this album, especially with the addition of the missing tracks from the original version, is a masterpiece. It has so many of the elements that have always made Ima Robot music interesting. 

“This album was so fun to make because we had nothing left to lose,” Timmy says. “We’d been dropped by our label – or more so the label imploded in the great switchover era from CDs to downloads to streaming. We’d given up on the commercializing of music and were just having fun being independent and unencumbered. Jamming as friends. It’s days like those that make music like this.”

There is also a noticeable shift in some of the songwriting that feels like a pathway to the Edward Sharpe music that Alex would go on to write after this time period. Listening to these songs in 2025 not only brings back a lot of the emotions and memories I had from such pivotal times in my own life but also they have completely aged like fine wine. So many textures throughout the album and none of it feels dated. It’s been a joyous challenge to get it to a stage where it is now available for people to discover. It’s also been the catalyst for releasing  more Ima Robot music soon, some that’s never been digitally released

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Another Man’s Treasure (Deluxe Edition) is available now on Bandcamp and for distribution via In Sheep’s Clothing. Shops can send us an email [email protected]