What started as a five-piece folk-rock band in Boston, while studying at Berklee College of Music, became a duo based in Berlin after a year apart. Ten years, two albums and an EP later, Nature in the City is Robin Sellin and Johannes, an acoustic pop-folk project spanning Melbourne and the German countryside between Hamburg and Berlin. They reunite, usually once a year during the German summer, to catch up on lost time, work on new material and play concerts.

Originally inspired by the singer-songwriter scene of the early 2000s, Jack Johnson and John Mayer as constant reference points, they later absorbed the folk of the 2010s including Boy & Bear and The Lumineers.

Their latest record, Metcalfe, was conceived and produced remotely. The songs were written in a mud-brick cottage in the Victorian countryside. It contains stories about living in the country, longing for a lover, emotional intimacy and its absence between fathers and sons, the peculiar strain and hope of a long-distance relationship, and a couple moving through burnout and emotional winter. Long-time contributors from Australia, Germany, Italy, the USA and Canada were invited into the process, adding electric guitar, drums, backing vocals and piano.

Nature in the City lives according to its own rhythms and seasons. It may go quiet for a while. It may return unexpectedly. There is probably another record somewhere between Melbourne and Berlin, waiting for the right summer.