For two longtime Reno musicians and brothers—guitarist/vocalist Cody and bassist/vocalist Greggy Rea—their newest band, Ranger, was more than just another music project to start up in the early 2020s. It has ended up being a complete 180-degree change that they both said helped them out as people as much as musicians.
“I was breaking up with a longtime friend and a longtime girlfriend, and coming from a lot of toxic masculine bullshit left over from my youth,” Cody said of that post-lockdown timeframe. “I was just done with that whole macho bullshit culture, frat culture. And it was bleeding into my music life, as it does with a lot of bands—just really toxic environments.
“And so, if I’m being honest about (the members of Ranger) coming together as friends, it felt really clean and really transparent and loving. And that was like, ‘Oh God, yeah, this has to be a band.’”
The brothers worked together for most of the 2010s in a group that had changing members and three different names: City of August, Bluff Caller and The Band Washoe.
“I felt like Cody and I were about ready to give up or go do our own thing,” Greggy said. “And then this whole new community came in, and it almost felt too good to be true. It’s like a fairy tale, for two or three years to just be in this honeymoon phase, and it still is.”
This joy-inducing switch-up in social circles has brought Ranger a following and a distinctive rock-meets-dreampop sound. It’s led to playing at the Off Beat Festival and making a regular name for themselves at venues like The Alpine, Holland Project and Lo-Bar, where they have a show on Saturday, Jan. 31. They’ve also ventured into California for shows within the past year.
Along with the Reas, Ranger features guitarist/vocalist Aris Andrews and keyboard player Caleb Collins. Cody plays drums on the band’s recordings, but John Walker is their drummer for live shows.
The band started as a social circle first, meeting at parties or nights out. Cody said he met Andrews at a mutual friend’s pool party in 2021.
“He and I just immediately hit it off in a total social capacity,” Cody said. “It wasn’t really about music at first. We kind of clicked and immediately found out that we just enjoyed each other’s company. And then, of course, it’s kind of unavoidable—you get into talking about music and what’s going on, and things just lined up perfectly for the band.”
Around that same timeframe, Greggy said he bumped into Andrews on the dance floor at The Emerson. Collins was a friend of Andrews who has been a mainstay in his past bands, even during times that they lived in Tennessee and Northern California.
“Caleb and I always loved playing together,” Andrews said. “He played with me a lot in my solo work (as Aris James), and it was like a no-brainer when this was forming.”
With a lineup in place, the group took several years to craft songs in their own studio, which moved around a lot from 2022 to 2025—to the basement of Shim’s Supply, Cody’s apartment, an office space in Midtown and, for now, a more permanent home in Andrews’ basement.
Ranger’s debut album, You Don’t Have to Be Anyone, released last May, mixes different music worlds together. The sound of modern dreampop—long story short, it’s melody-driven indie rock with an atmospheric haze courtesy of overdriven and effect-laden guitars—is welded to harmonies and melodies not too far away from the big-stadium sounds of straight-ahead alternative rock from the 2000s.
With a texture and lyrical vulnerability that recalls classic music written by women-led bands like The Sundays or Cocteau Twins, it totally fits the group’s mutual breakaway from the typical “dude rock” vibe.
“I think what stands out in a lot of those bands is the pitch of the vocals if they are sung by a woman,” said Andrews, who is also in the local garage/indie band Church Ladies. “Like a band like Night Tapes, who we all adore, their vocals always come through, and you can hear what she’s saying.
“We like that the lyrics are still there, and they have an important place, and they are EQ’ed just right. They have their sonic room, and we try to keep it like that for our music while still keeping it dreamy in a sense—keeping the guitars affected.”
Cody, who does the recording and mixing for Ranger, admitted that he’s uncomfortable about fitting into a specific genre, quickly adding that “it sounds so pretentious” to say that.
“I do feel a little insecure sometimes about calling us a dreampop band,” Cody said. “We’re not afraid to be uncool, even if that’s hard to take sometimes. Like, we have Coldplay leanings and Radiohead leanings, and there are times when it’s just like, ‘Oh God, this is, like, really borrowed, weird-forward alt-rock.’
“I think on the next album, too, we want to ride the line between dark, dreamy, washed-out music, but also our sense of earnest lyrics that deal with shame and sex and second changes and all this stuff that we keep coming back to. I don’t want to sacrifice all that in order to be some super-sick, coded dreampop band. So, it’s a moving target.”
Ranger is set to play with indie-soul-psychedelic band Analog Dog from San Francisco, and local indie group Evening Spirits, at 8:30 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 31, at Lo-Bar Social, 445 California Ave, in Reno. There is a $5 cover charge. For more about Ranger, go to ranger.set.bio or instagram.com/ranger__world.