The Room Alex & Austin Ward Wanted: Nine Inch Nails, Goldeneye 007, X-Men Figures & Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts · Spotify

What do Nine Inch Nails, Goldeneye 007, X-Men Figures & Cinnamon Toast Crunch have in common?

For brothers Alex and Austin Ward of Hembree, they’re four pieces of a childhood spent growing up together in Fort Scott, Kansas, surrounded by music, video games, action figures and the occasional bowl of “vacation cereal.”

Nine Inch Nails takes them back to discovering the band at an impossibly young age, falling down a rabbit hole trying to find “Closer,” and eventually blasting Broken and The Fragile while playing GoldenEye for hours. They also talk about how Trent Reznor’s approach to sound, negative space and live production continues to influence the way Hembree makes music today.

Then there’s GoldenEye 007, the game that turned a tiny bedroom into a summer hangout for a rotating crew of friends. Four-player split-screen, proximity mines, unwritten rules and eight kids waiting their turn all became part of the experience.

For the X-Men figures, Alex and Austin revisit their childhood collection, the battle over who got which character, and why Austin willingly stepped away from Wolverine so he could be Beast instead. That childhood idea of everyone bringing a different “superpower” to the group eventually becomes an unexpected connection to the way Hembree works together as a band.

And finally, there’s Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It wasn’t an everyday cereal in the Ward household. As they agreed, it was more of a vacation cereal, something special enough to make the case for. Their mom would even buy the knockoff version, which, according to the brothers, sometimes managed to eclipse the original.

Maybe that’s what makes these four choices stick. Some were shared, some were discovered on their own, and some were simply things that made being a kid a little more fun. Together, they paint a pretty good picture of where Alex and Austin came from.

Four choices. Four pieces of childhood. One room that tells Alex & Austin’s story.