The back door of a brick bungalow in Evanston doesn’t look like much. Walk through it, head downstairs, cut past the laundry room, and you end up winding through a record collection and a jukebox before the space opens into something else: a room with a sparkling floor, thick red curtains on every wall, and enough microphones and vintage gear to stop you mid-step. That’s School Hours Studio. Lee Diamond’s basement operation, named for the hours when his wife Chaney — a teacher — and their kids are out of the house and the drums can actually breathe.
On one day last year, J Robbins flew in from Baltimore to record here. That session — along with material Diamond tracked himself — makes up “The Four Flags,” a four-song compilation EP from Chicago’s Funeral Recordings in collaboration with School Hours Studio, featuring With Patience, Orlock, IUIO, and SoundTracks.
Four projects, overlapping membership, shared history across two cities, and the same two collaborators running through all of it: Robbins, who mixed everything at Magpie Cage in Baltimore, and Bob Weston, who mastered the record at his new facility, Weston Masters, in Parede, Portugal. The EP is out April 17.
School Hours has been a long time coming. Diamond, now in his mid-50s, has been playing music since he was six, and some of the gear in the current room has been in his possession for nearly as long. This is his third (and a half) studio build. The first went up in 2000 in a rented Wicker Park house belonging to Dave Weaver — his bandmate in the Chicago punk band the Douglass Kings.
Before breaking ground on that one, Diamond sat down with Steve Albini, who had already recorded Diamond and Weaver in their previous band, Alkaloid, at his own home studio — the pre-Electrical Audio bungalow setup his circle called Shabby Road — and got a proper rundown on acoustics and gear choices. That Wicker Park room became the recording location for the Douglass Kings’ final LP, “Orchestra.”
The next major construction project: Diamond helped build Bob Weston’s Chicago Mastering Studio. After that, a home studio in the family’s Portage Park house — that one flooded before it was finished. Then School Hours, started in 2015 in the Evanston bungalow, where everything finally landed.
The room is designed for one person to run a session efficiently — small monitors are mounted in the tracking areas so musicians can follow the Pro Tools session in real time without crowding the desk.
It doubles as a video set: Diamond’s YouTube series “Inappropriate Drummer,” where he re-imagines post-hardcore records through a heavy metal lens, is filmed in this room. The studio’s proximity to Rogers Park makes it a natural gathering point for frequent collaborators like Chris and Ali Wade of Orlock and IUIO. And it can hold a crowd when needed — recently, those red curtains soaked up the ambient sound of a basement full of friends and local scene members tracking a Woody Guthrie protest song for the next With Patience LP.
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The connections between the four acts on “The Four Flags” require some untangling. Diamond plays drums in both With Patience and Orlock. Orlock is built around the husband-and-wife duo of vocalist Ali Wade and guitarist-vocalist Chris Wade, who also record and perform as IUIO and run Funeral Recordings.
Chris Wade was previously in hose.got.cable — a band that surfaces in Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton’s memoir, “Desolation,” for context on how deep this Richmond, VA lineage actually runs. Orlock first formed in the mid-1990s in the same Richmond scene that produced GWAR and Lamb of God, recorded and toured with the original lineup, then went dormant before the Wades eventually relocated to Chicago and brought the band back to life with Diamond’s involvement.
The comeback EP, “III,” came out on Funeral in late 2024, with Chris handling all bass parts on the record while Ali took over live bass duties for Orlock’s first show back in May 2025.
“Lite Racy,” their track on this EP, is the first recording to feature new bassist Matt Fleming, currently of Bloodlined Calligraphy and Orlock, who also co-wrote the song.
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Orlock are booked to play Caterwaul Fest in Minnesota in June 2026.
Diamond has been the recording engineer on every With Patience release — the “Fitted Sheet B/W Strawberry” single, the “Three Of Swords” EP, and the debut LP “Triptych” — with the consistent workflow being: Diamond tracks everything at School Hours, ships files to Robbins to mix at Magpie Cage, and Robbins sends the mixes to Weston for mastering.
That’s the setup that produced everything With Patience has put out. For “The Four Flags,” Robbins was physically in the room for the Orlock and With Patience sessions — the first time that had happened in years of working together.
Both bands had written, rehearsed, and demoed their material to the point where they came in ready to cut. That preparation gave Robbins room to focus on what he actually does — dialing in tones, pushing performances — rather than troubleshooting.
Chris Wade: “Everyone nailed their parts in a couple takes so it all feels really fresh and real.” When Ali finished tracking her vocals for “Lite Racy,” Robbins let it play back, turned to the band, and said one word: “Frightening.”
The IUIO and SoundTracks tracks were both recorded by Diamond himself, with Robbins mixing at Magpie Cage.
With Patience’s “Lipstick Traces” takes its name from Greil Marcus’s book of the same name — the theoretical deep-dive that pulls a single thread from the Sex Pistols back through the Situationist International, Dada, and decades of culture-as-refusal.
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Bassist and vocalist Lance Curran: “The critique of capitalism as spectacle and the call for a revolution of everyday life feel more urgent than ever.” The song arrives with a quote borrowed from anonymous graffiti, Paris, 1968: “I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires.”
This is also the first With Patience release where Robbins served as recording engineer in addition to mixer — on every previous release, that first role had belonged exclusively to Diamond.
Orlock’s “Lite Racy” folds thrash, groove, and sludge together, and the title reflects Ali Wade’s take on the current moment directly: “It’s all bad news, all the time now, and people are more desensitized than ever.”
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The title itself is a play on that same numbness — something obvious sitting right in front of you that doesn’t register.
IUIO operates on a different axis entirely. The project layers ambient goth, extreme metal, and noise over largely improvised constructions, which made tracking them a different kind of session — Diamond stepping out from behind the console and onto the kit as a guest drummer.
The approach was exactly as open-ended as you’d expect: “We tracked over 10 minutes of guitar then asked Lee to chop it in half and stack the tracks on top of each other,” Chris Wade says. “Then we told him ‘pretend you’re falling from the sky onto your kit and play a blast beat’ and he nailed it.” Ali’s vocals were the last layer added before the files went to Baltimore. The track was recorded on Halloween.
SoundTracks is Diamond’s instrumental post-rock project, which has been developing for about a decade from a slightly unusual starting point: he originally conceived the idea while running architectural and historical bike tours of Chicago neighborhoods, writing music as potential soundtracks for documentary videos about those routes.
“Originally these songs had titles like ‘The Tour of Irving Park,'” Diamond says, “but this one seems more appropriate for our current morass.” “Oligarchs…” was built at School Hours, with Nate McBride, Brett Ratner, and Dan MacAdam contributing their parts remotely — “Good friends Nate McBride, Brett Ratner and Dan MacAdam helped make this song a zillion times better than I had originally conceived,” Diamond adds. Robbins mixed it at Magpie Cage; Diamond directed a video for it.
The mastering credit on “The Four Flags” goes to Weston at his new facility in Parede, Portugal — one of the first projects to come through Weston Masters.
All prior With Patience records were mastered at Weston’s Chicago studio, a room Diamond had helped build.
It’s a loop that goes back further than most people probably know: from Albini walking a young Diamond through acoustic treatment in a Northside bungalow called Shabby Road, to Diamond helping lay the groundwork for Weston’s Chicago room, to a one-day basement session in Evanston where all of these threads — Richmond, Chicago, Baltimore, Parede — converged long enough to cut four songs.
The EP is out April 17 on Funeral Recordings.
