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Few groups in history, recent or otherwise, elevate mood to such singular, smoldering supremacy as the Australian duo of Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang aka HTRK [‘Hate Rock’]. Across nearly two decades of work, wounds (co-founder Sean Stewart tragically took his own life in 2010), and world tours, their sound has shape-shifted between densities and intensities, noise and nakedness, but never wavered in its delicate poetic gravity. Theirs is a chemistry of smoke, echo, and the undertows of desire, the dislocation of cities and memory, the melancholy of distance and deepening night. It’s music of solitude and sensuality, for small hours and lost weekends, spoken in an intimate shadowplay language of skeletal electronics, velvet voice, and noir guitar.

HTRK’s albums have been released by an array of international labels including Fire (Nostalgia), Blast First Petite (Marry Me Tonight), Boomkat Editions (Over The Rainbow), and Ghostly International (Psychic 9-5 Club, Venus In Leo). For the occasion of their most recent full-length, the celebrated slowburn suite Rhinestones, they founded their own artist imprint, N&J Blueberries. In the live setting they transform spectral torch songs into quiet storms of tension, texture, and transcendence.

Harpist Marilu Donovan and violinist/vocalist Adam Markiewicz are NYC-based duo LEYA.

The group works with and against the grain of tradition, mining intensity through alternate tunings, strange harmonies, and dreamstate operatic-like vocals. This experience is one of beauty but spans many imperfect worlds.
LEYA has released a steady volume of work in several years. Their two albums via NNA Tapes, The Fool (2018) and its critically acclaimed follow-up Flood Dream (2020), exist alongside a wide range of collaborations. In 2018, the group wrote and performed a full-length soundtrack to I Love You, an erotic film directed by Brooke Candy and produced by PornHub that also features the duo as actors. 2019’s Angel Lust, a collaborative EP with Eartheater, followed courtesy of legendary experimental label PAN. In 2020, they dropped a number of shorter releases including “Antigone,” a collaborative single with American black metal band Liturgy; a remix of their Flood Dream track “Wave” by British electronic musician Actress; another remix of the album’s penultimate track “First Way” by the venerable Drew McDowall (Coil/Psychic TV); and a collaboration with Deli Girls for their new album BOSS called “barriers to love.” Composer/Filmmaker Christina Vantzou delivered a final mashup remix of Flood Dream’s “Mary” and “ABBA” in May 2021.

New(-ish) Atlanta indie four-piece Sword II might feel like no big thing at first glance. The band self-released its first EP entitled Between II Gardens — four songs stacked with layers of lo-fi samples and lustrous instrumental textures that are bound to draw oversimplified personifications to My Bloody Valentine, True Widow, and Murray Street-era Sonic Youth — into the vast ether of Spotify on Jan. 9, 2020. But underneath, in the stories of its four members, Carter Sutherland (guitar/vocals), Travis Arnold (guitar/vocals), Maria González (bass/vocals), and José Izaguirre (drums), is something critically relevant to the landscape of Atlanta music and its countless splinters.

For anyone slightly embedded in the local Atlanta music scene, Sword II doesn’t arrive as a total stranger. Izaguirre is the guitarist and vocalist for Latinx punk band Yukons, González plays guitar in Latinx lo-fi garage pop outfit Kibi James, Arnold plays guitar in up-and-coming hardcore outfit Playytime, and Sutherland has been in a slew of Atlanta bands over the years, including Sea Ghost and Trashcan. Both Yukons and Kibi James have received exceedingly positive reviews and reception from Atlanta’s music scene since their inceptions, with their names regularly adorning the bills of the city’s most noteworthy line-ups, seemingly moving them forward at a steady pace for some time.

For a band that wasn’t intended to be much of anything, Sword II represents a lot — it represents the void that exists in Atlanta’s local music scene and culture, the need to further create spaces for people to comfortably exist, and it’s a lethal injection of lush into a scene that tends to be subjected to the same, repetitive dryness that many of us have become overly accustomed to. More importantly, Sword II is part of the ripple effect; the one that says we exist, too, to those who need to hear it most. – Aja Arnold