For listeners interested in picking up some local indie folk music, Northwestern Lehigh alumni Alessandro Consuelos, Class of 2015, and Dylan Rex, Class of 2013, have recently released their first six-song album, “Songs about Cities and Townships” as the band Twin Pigeons.

Consuelos, who grew up in Fogelsville and is now living in New York City, and Rex of New Tripoli, first met in high school through a mutual friend, and then again at a musical performance at Ontelaunee Park, Lynn Township.

“We both had our own separate bands, and we found out the other one played music, Rex said. “We’d been itching to play music with other people for a while.”

They described how music had influenced their lives from early age, and how they had played in their own bands before forming Twin Pigeons.

“I was in the drama club when I was in high school, and I went to church when I was younger a lot, so I was always surrounded by music,” Rex said.

After playing song covers for a time, he was inspired to start writing music after listening to Bruce Springsteen’s early music.

“Just the energy he produces was really inspiring and enticing, so after kind of diving through that I started writing my own songs,” Rex explained, adding he would go on to form his first band, the folk/country group Rust.

Consuelos loved music from a young age, and around 9- or 10-years-old he discovered the blues.

“Which kind of started it for me,” Consuelos said, adding he was also influenced by the music of Jimi Hendrix.

“I’d never heard a guitar be expressive in that way, and I think that’s what made me pick up a guitar,” he said.

After playing in some pickup groups, Consuelos formed his first band during his sophomore year, The Noise on 309, and played with them for several years before merging with Rex’s band to form “new” Rust with a focus on “an edgier sound” and psychedelic influences.

As “new” Rust, Consuelos, Rex and their other bandmates released an EP and full-length album and performed around Northwestern Lehigh School District for several years.

“We put on two concerts at the New Tripoli Fire Company … We kind of used the space we were living in to incorporate ourselves in the community,” Rex said. “We definitely wanted to be a part of it.”

Rex added they also played at community shows in the park and out of Consuelos’ garage.

Their former band drifted apart when they went to college - Rex to Hofstra University, Consuelos to the University of Pennsylvania - and it was during this time they thought about organizing a smaller, two-man operation.

Thus, Twin Pigeons was formed as a mix of the “old” Rust folksiness and the duo’s appreciation for acoustic folk-driven sounds and the psychedelic tendencies of their newer work.

“This is a good distillation of a variety of the different styles we both love,” Rex said.

They explained how the name came about saying they were initially interested in the idea of a clay pigeon.

“I liked the idea of the clay pigeon as something artificial, but with a natural name,” Consuelos explained.

This was before deciding on Twin Pigeons as a creative metaphor to describe the band members and their freestyle approach to music.

“It was just a way to reference there are only two people in the band … It was weird enough and ambiguous enough, yet it said there were two people in the band,” Rex said.

“Songs About Cities and Townships,” the band’s first album, debuted April 26.

The album consists of six songs - “The Tourist,” “Nebraska,” “Red Desert,” “Suburban Dream No. 15, Pt. 1,” “Pts. 2 & 3” and “42nd Street,” a mix of folk, indie rock, psychedelic and pseudo-electronic influences.

Work on the album started in the summer of 2019 shortly after Consuelos returned from college.

The two band members said they worked on the music over the course of three months when they had free time.

“I guess this took - the writing and recording process - it was kind of off-and-on when we had time over the course of last summer,” Consuelos explained. “It was kind of the attitude of this group; we pick it up, we put it down, it’s about having fun.”

Rex noted most of the album’s recordings were improvised or written in the moment.

“At times [Alessandro] would just come to me with his guitar part and I would work out a keyboard part, or a harmonica part, or vocals, and it was just kind of feeling what gave me some sort of feeling, some sort of emotion,” he said. “I riffed off that however I could. It was a really exhilarating way of recording.”

The entire album was recorded in a bedroom at Consuelos’ parents’ farmhouse in Schnecksville.

“The acoustics were weirdly good,” he said. “It had nice surfaces, a little bit of bounce, and it was super, super quiet, so we were able to get really clean recordings without having to do anything crazy.”

Consuelos wrote the lyrics, while both bandmates shared instrumental and music credit.

Additionally, the tracks were mixed and mastered by Consuelos’ friend, musician Matt Sperrazza.

Consuelos and Rex said the EP’s title was inspired by a Talking Heads record - “More Songs about Buildings and Food” - and described how their lyrics and rhythm drew influences from a number of musical performers including Neil Young, Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground, David Bowie, The Band, Bob Dylan, the Wu Tang Clan and Franz Schubert, among others.

“‘Songs about Cities and Townships’ is kind of a direct line into the things that I’m writing about, because all the songs on the album are more or less about, ‘I live in this one place, and I used to live in this other place,’” he explained. “It’s a lot of songs about places and people, which was a focus for me writing-wise.”

Rex said the song names are related to the sensation of constant movement captured in the lyrics and music.

“The first song’s called ‘The Tourist.’ It kind of drops you inside of that intellectual space immediately,” Rex said. “It’s almost like a traveling record without the road. You just end up at the place, you don’t go anywhere … it’s very dreamlike.

Consuelos and Rex are working on a second album influenced by the atmosphere and experiences of living during the COVID-19 pandemic, although there is no release date yet.

“The stuff I’ve been writing has been a lot about the strange times we find ourselves in,” Consuelos said. “It’s been weird because we have to do this from relative isolation, so it’s a lot of me sending him [Dylan] ideas, him riffing on them and sending them back.”

“A lot of the stuff is kind of dealing with the isolation we all have to deal with, and a sort of technological socialism. That’s kind of strange,” Rex added. “We definitely have a handful of songs, and we’re in the second stage into development.

Consuelos and Rex said they are looking forward to working together in person again when possible, having a good time and writing music in their own unique style.

“It’s a very good energy when we get together, and we’ve been working with each other for a long time and we kind of mellow each other out … It’s just so easy to just ‘feel it,’” Rex said.

“I think we’re able to communicate musically very well and just be on the same wavelength,” Consuelos said.

“Songs About Cities and Townships” is available on Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify, SoundCloud and the Twin Pigeons’ Bandcamp page twinpigeons.bandcamp.com/releases.