Sword II feel like the last transmission from a world Atlanta once promised. A decade ago, the city’s DIY underground was a fever dream stitched together with bad wiring and limitless imagination—WonderRoot’s collapsing ceiling, the queer-surreal haze of Rowdy Dowdy, the Mammal Gallery beating at the center like a faulty drum machine. Five bucks got you garage-psych whirlpools, scorched-earth noise, and Awful Records–adjacent cloud-rap mutating in real time. Rock might’ve held the mic, but something stranger—feral, half-rap, half-ritual—was sprouting in the corners, soon to become the blueprint for a generation. Then the venues folded, one by one, and the renaissance curdled into memory.
Sword II were born in that collapse. The trio—Mari González from dream-pop shapeshifters Kibi James, Travis Arnold of Playytime’s raw-nerve hardcore, and Certain Zuko, indie-rock wanderer and Larry League alum—arrived with the urgency of artists who knew the ground was giving way beneath them. Their early EP in 2020 hinted at a language built from shrieks, decay, and emotional dissonance. Spirit World Tour, their 2023 debut, took it to its jagged extreme: a claustrophobic howl shaped by the streets outside their window—BLM uprisings, #StopCopCity tensions, the specter of a world on fire.
Electric Hour feels like the moment after the screaming stops—when you realize the silence has a pulse. The album trades the scorched intensity for something unexpectedly tender, as if the band finally found a clearing but still can’t shake the ghosts that followed them in. Its softness wasn’t planned; recording in a decrepit farmhouse with wiring that threatened to quite literally shock them into oblivion, the trio leaned on acoustic textures, sharing guitars instead of hiding behind Ableton grids. What emerges is their most human work: open, unarmored, and quietly luminous.
Each member cycles through guitar, bass, and vocals like a séance in rotation. González’s voice floats like a half-formed memory; Zuko’s cracked tenor aches with earnest charm; Arnold’s hushed rasp drips theatrical tension. The González-helmed tracks—“Sugarcane,” “Even If It’s Just a Dream”—glow the brightest, but Sword II are strongest when they blur into one organism. “Gun You Hold” is the band in perfect chiaroscuro: Zuko muttering dissatisfaction over crooked guitar lines, Arnold stepping in with a bruised attempt at comfort, each voice shading the other.
By dialing down the chaos, the trio make room for narrative dread. “Sentry” is a gothic dispatch from inside our algorithmic panopticon, González hearing a sentient presence humming in the late-night sirens, her reassurance—“I know that I’m not alone”—warping into something closer to panic. “Who’s Giving You Love” cracks open the time capsule, flashing back to their early grit with blown-out drums and splintered chaos reminiscent of a beer-soaked night at the Mammal Gallery.
The album’s closing moments arrive like dawn through boarded-up windows. The feedback ebbs, the edges soften, and “Even If It’s Just a Dream” exhales—Sword II sounding less like the remnants of a vanished scene and more like its stubborn, shimmering continuation. In a city where the rooms that once held their world have mostly disappeared, they play as if keeping the flame alive is its own form of resistance.
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