Atlanta’s intense and experimental DIY underground offers an amalgamation of punk, shoegaze, alternative rap, and noise-rock — and as a result, it’s ripe with bands to watch. There’s Playytime, Silly Goose, Upchuck, and more — though today, our full attention is all on Sword II, an invaluable player from the scene.
In true DIY spirit, the three-piece have put in years, forging a feeling of unity at local house shows and unconventional venues. Their brash, experimental debut album, Spirit World Tour, arrived post-pandemic and took on the fraught political landscape — a charged message to their city and beyond. Their off-the-wall process and melodic noise-punk introduction embodied the underground, and made a mark that left listeners eager for what might come next.
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What came next was a shock, of sorts. It’s never a given that bands we deem “experimental” will continue experimenting. But Sword II did. Electric Hour was recorded over 14 months, during which the band holed up in a rundown house in Atlanta — recording the album in a mildew-filled makeshift studio in the basement. Soon realizing the electricity wasn’t working all too well, and the basement had flooded, they simply adapted. They’d incorporate some acoustic instruments, the sound would be stripped back.
And the album born of these surroundings is different. Softer. Their most cohesive and collaborative work to date, Electric Hour is deep and dreamy, textural and layered, and where there had been Spirit World’s angst, the abrasiveness of noise, there are literal harmonies, and exposed emotions. Though DIY through and through, this album sees the band lean hard into their version of pop sensibility — which includes psychedelic elements, shoegaze, and indie rock. The band are currently on tour with Electric Hour, with support from Tex Patrello.
Bean Nickerson
Can you describe the Atlanta music scene you came up in — the highlights, the challenges, the venues, experiences, and people that have helped shape you as artists, and a band?
MARI GONZÁLEZ: The first show I ever played was an Abolish ICE house show my friends threw in 2018. A lot of us had been participating in demonstrations and an encampment at a jail, and that show really revealed to me how important it is to have release and celebrate life in times of intense organizing and fighting in the streets. Music is such a powerful recharge and really brings people together and contextualizes the moment. Drunken Unicorn in Atlanta was the first real venue that I played, which will always be special to me because I used to skip class in high school to drive into the city to get boba and make the early punk shows.
TRAVIS ARNOLD: I came up in the ATL music scene a few years before officially starting the band around 2019. ATL had a very rich DIY culture at the time. Everyone in every scene was throwing huge shows and parties in their backyard, on rooftops, house shows, warehouses, and DIY venues. Mixed-genre DIY bills were the norm, and that definitely influenced our approach to music and performance.
CERTAIN ZUKO: I started going to shows at a DIY venue in the suburbs when I was 12 years old, and I started going to this place in the city called Wonderroot when I was 15-16. Back before COVID, there were a lot of DIY venues and house show spots. I saw this band called Places to Hide a lot when I was 16. They were incredible. I was really obsessed with them and would go to all their shows. I would beg my friends and manipulate them to drive me there because I couldn’t drive. People were dancing, screaming the lyrics. I also saw a lot of screamo and metalcore bands at this time. I was in high school when Awful Records was blowing up. We would go to their parties and shows and stuff. They had such a strong collective, so many artists dropping music and bouncing off each other. Then I worked at Mammal Gallery and also Murmur, booking shows and doing sound. I met a lot of artists that way, saw a ton of people from out of town perform, like The Cradle from NY and Weyes Blood early on.
There’s something so atmospheric about your music — it’s immersive, world-building. When you approach a project, do you go in with an overarching concept and build tracks around that, or are you working in real time, making a collection of songs to string together?
GONZÁLEZ: I think often we have an idea of how we want to work together and things we want to try with sound or what we want to express in the lyrics. I don’t think any of our songs sound that similar to each other — we really try to give respect and energy to each idea and let it come through as we are working on it, without heavy constraints of anything we want it to sound like. In the end, I think they always all make sense and inform each other in a way that is unexpected.
ARNOLD: Sometimes we just catch a vibe off a riff or sound. In the beginning, experimental sound design was at the forefront of our approach. In our latest album, Electric Hour, we approached worldbuilding with a more songwriting-focused approach. Driven more by lyrical themes and storytelling without focusing too much on the social themes. At this point, the sonic themes came more second nature to us.
ZUKO: With this last album, we didn’t have a super strong direction when we started writing. There were a lot of things we were messing around with. After the first few tracks, we were like, “Oh OK, it’s the Electric Hour.” When Mari suggested that as the name, it really helped tie everything together conceptually. I think with the next album, we might start with a name or a concept in the beginning, at least loosely, because it helped so much having a common name for what we were working on.
What artists, albums, sounds have been the most influential to you?
GONZÁLEZ: I grew up listening to a lot of ’80s rock with my dad, which is an undeniable influence: The Cure, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, David Bowie, Kate Bush. I was an indie kid in the 2010s so naturally obsessed with Karen O and the Shins and Paramore. I also listened to so much radio, so I still have a strong taste for pop music. Right now, I just love music that bridges theatrical performance with rock pop and the esoteric. There’s this awesome movie we watched called Repo! The Genetic Opera that has an immaculate vibe.
ARNOLD: Chris Isaak – Heart Shaped World, Sonic Youth – Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, Blood Orange – Coastal Grooves, the Weeknd – House of Balloons, Ramones – Road to Ruin, Atari Teenage Riot – The Future of War, Mazzy Star – So Tonight That I Might See, Björk – Volta, the Cure, lots of ’80s-inspired metal and pop.
ZUKO: MGMT. Honestly everything they have made, especially the first couple albums and their college stuff, Mitski – Bury Me at Makeout Creek, Dean Blunt – Black Metal, Spirit of the Beehive – self-titled, Passion Pit’s first album. It’s so good.
Your last project was made in such a specific setting, as DIY as it gets. Is that part of the DNA of the band, or do you think you’d try going into a more polished direction in the future?
GONZÁLEZ: The DIY culture is so embedded into who we are and how we learned to make and experience art I can’t see that ever being something that doesn’t inform how we make music. There is a type of experimentation that is so unique to DIY spaces and guerrilla shows where you learn to improvise with the limitations. That was a lot of this last album, working around our limits — like when the electric guitars started electrocuting us, we picked up the acoustic instruments and made something else. That being said, right now I am loving playing on bigger stages and want to keep growing as an artist and take the music to a lot of places. At this point, that feels like a new kind of experimentation to me.
ARNOLD: Yes. I’m excited to explore all the themes and symbols that represent what DIY really means. The true spirit of coming together with like-minded people to organize and do what you believe in without waiting for approval.
ZUKO: Yeah, totally part of the DNA. I think what excites us with recording is mixing the super polished with the super dirty and experimental. I hope we get more intense in both directions simultaneously. I want the vocals to be Electric HourBritney Spears-level polished and throw that over 144p guitars or something. Or record a broken amp with a $1,000,000 mic. If anyone has a million-dollar microphone, or whatever the most expensive mic is, hit us up so we can use it incorrectly.
Bean Nickerson
Sword II live shows feel intense and intimate at the same time — how do you approach performance differently from recording?
GONZÁLEZ: The recording process sometimes feels pulled in so many directions and possibilities. It’s such a different practice of making decisions and experimenting. It’s often for us really slow and focused. Playing shows definitely informs how we want to write music, but it is such a different experience to actually be in the room with the audience. Once onstage, all the writing and rehearsal are done, and it is just a matter of leaning into what you rehearsed and playing in between the spaces of that. I think that space is where the magic happens, and where we can really live in the music with the fans.
ARNOLD: Performing is fun because I get to be connected with the audience, and the audience can connect with us. Even just seeing how people in the crowd react to a certain move I do or how I approach the mic really has informed me about making music moving forward. I like to move a lot onstage and have little dance moves, so what I’m playing on guitar needs to hit in a simply epic way. I want everything I play and every note I sing to hit and resonate in a way that makes the crowd feel alive and connected.
ZUKO: We really try to connect with the audience. The vibe can be so different night to night. Sometimes people want to mosh and go crazy, and other times people are hugging each other, singing the lyrics. So we really fed off that. We changed up the songs a lot live. We’re less worried about precision — it’s more about trying to connect to the room.
Has there been a live moment that felt like a turning point for the band?
GONZÁLEZ: Our last show on the tour in Atlanta, there was a moment when I dropped out of the verse on “Sugarcane” and dozens of people in the room were yelling the lyrics back to us. It was so surreal and awesome.
ARNOLD: This past run of shows on the East Coast was like night and day from other shows before. Seeing people in the crowd get so hyped and singing the words back to us from an album we just dropped was surreal. In Chicago, when I autographed a handful of vapes was when I knew something was different. [Laughs.]
ZUKO: Honestly, when we played in New York and there were so many people who knew the words, dancing, I was like, “Wow.” It’s hard to sing when other people are singing the lyrics, because I was smiling a lot and laughing. It’s such a joyous experience when everyone sings together. It’s like a choir — it makes the room so much louder. It made me think about what lyrics would sound the best being screamed in a big room with other people.
What kind of spaces do you feel most at home playing?
GONZÁLEZ: I like big and high stages, girl sound engineers. I love strobes. I love when there’s no barrier so fans can get really close to the stage. I love when security is not power tripping on people. I love a valid green room… Most of all, I just love when the fans like the venue and feel comfortable to sing and dance with us.
ARNOLD: I love playing in big-ass venues where the stage is huge to a ton of people. I love to move around a lot. I’ll always love playing smaller clubs or diy shows, but there’s something so electrifying about being on a huge stage where you can see the scale of the audience and the sound onstage is fucking perfect.
ZUKO: The best place to see a show is like a packed 200-cap room that’s loud. The stage should be between 4-5 feet high or less. We’ve also done a lot of shows outside that have felt amazing. This last tour, we really felt at home everywhere whenever people were singing the lyrics.
There’s a strong emotional undercurrent in your music. Are your lyrics personal, observational, or abstract? What’s the lyrical process?
GONZÁLEZ: We write lyrics for each other a lot. We were all going through so much while we were writing this album, and I think we tried to help each other make sense of a lot of the emotions and complexities and connect them to bigger ideas through the lyrics. It can be pretty vulnerable sharing lyrics you write. We are good at staying playful and building off each other to make something that we all mean and understand in our language of the music.
ARNOLD: I like to think of how we approach lyrics like contemporary prose poetry in song style. Emotional but not always dark, rhythmic with storytelling, personal but personable.
ZUKO: I like to think of our lyrics as little snippets, collages of experiences and reflections. Not all of it has to be so literal or exact. Sometimes poetry can be a shooting star, something that intervenes and cuts through logical debates. Poetry is where spirit comes out. It’s the realm of spiritual questions, and in this way, songs can be temples — places you can always return to meditate. That’s what I love about recordings and songwriting. It’s a way of creating spells, spells that reflect the times we’re in but also can be returned to years later. When we write lyrics together, which we almost always do together, at least in part, it really helps us balance the hyper-abstract with the desire to be understood. We’re inspired by so much; our friends, uprisings, resistance, love, and we try to bring the spirit of those things to bear through the lyrics and the sound.
For listeners, and fans, what is the experience you’re trying to create?
GONZÁLEZ: I’d like for people to tap into their freakiest, most imaginative version of themselves and be inspired to make something in that headspace and share with other people in their own language.
ARNOLD: I want it to feel like you’re watching a play, and the music is just the soundtrack.
ZUKO: Hypnosis, dancing, crying.
What’s next for Sword II?
GONZÁLEZ: Practice, touring, writing, sexy, love, revolution.
ARNOLD: Make more epic music, connect and collaborate with more people, and share our vision with the world.
ZUKO: Hopefully tour in South America, Africa, Asia.
If you had to give one, what is the “thesis statement” of the band?
GONZÁLEZ: Nourish life.
ARNOLD: Anything is possible.
ZUKO: Sound waves against the empire. Raise the freak flag.
