Four years after Duddy B and Rome Ramirez joined forces for Cactus Cool, their laid-back collaborative project may be far from finished. In fact, according to the Dirty Heads co-frontman, there is already a vault of unreleased Rome & Duddy material waiting for its moment.
With Rome currently back alongside Dirty Heads as part of the band’s summer tour with 311, Duddy revealed to ThePier.org that the longtime collaborators haven’t abandoned plans to revisit the project — and several finished songs from the original sessions have never seen the light of day.
“Absolutely. Yeah, we talk about it all the time. It’s going to happen. Like, it’s for sure gonna happen,” Duddy says.
The timing of a reunion is particularly fitting. After closing the Sublime with Rome chapter, Ramirez has been concentrating on establishing his next era as a solo artist. Duddy says giving his longtime friend room to build that identity was important before the pair jumped back into another collaborative release.
“With him leaving Sublime with Rome and going to do his own thing we felt like it was important for him to like take a year or two and really do his own thing and grow his own project and and then we’ll take a step back you know when there’s time and we’ll put out another roman duddy album,” Duddy says.
But another Rome & Duddy project doesn’t necessarily require starting from scratch.
According to Duddy, the sessions that produced Cactus Cool were significantly more prolific than what fans ultimately heard.
“We actually have like we wrote i think we wrote and recorded like ten songs for that cactus cool and we were planning on staggering them out so i mean we already have another like five songs that i absolutely love so we got to put them out eventually,” he reveals.
Asked directly whether those were simply ideas left over from the writing process or completed recordings, Duddy made the distinction clear.
“No, they’re recorded and they’re awesome. I love them.”
The revelation puts the Cactus Cool EP in a different light. Rather than being an isolated detour for two friends, the project appears to have been the first glimpse of a much larger body of music created during the sessions.
The chemistry between the two musicians stretches back considerably further than Cactus Cool. Rome was there during one of the most consequential moments in Dirty Heads history: the backyard writing session that eventually produced “Lay Me Down.” The collaboration became a breakthrough for Dirty Heads, topping the alternative charts and eventually earning Platinum certification in the United States.
Years later, Rome and Duddy turned that natural chemistry into a project of their own.
Now they’re sharing stages again.
Rome is currently out with Dirty Heads as part of the band’s summer run alongside 311, bringing the longtime collaborators back into the same orbit night after night. The package also underscores just how intertwined their musical histories have become, with Dirty Heads and Rome representing different branches of the Southern California reggae-rock world that helped push the sound far beyond its original scene.
Whether those unreleased Cactus Cool recordings emerge individually, as another EP, or eventually form the foundation of a full-length project remains to be seen. Duddy didn’t offer a release date or concrete timetable.
What he did offer was considerably more definitive: Rome & Duddy isn’t over.
The songs are written. The recordings exist. And, as Duddy puts it, “we got to put them out eventually.”
Watch the full interview with Duddy B below:
