Sword II is an Atlanta trio composed up of multi-instrumentalists Mari González, Certain Zuko, and Travis Arnold, who share lead vocal duties. Having cut their teeth in different parts of the city’s music scene, the band put out an EP in 2020 before coming through with their debut album, Spirit World Tour, in 2023. While that album focused on abrasive experimentation, its follow-up, Electric Hour, finds them honing in on their collaborative songwriting: still eclectic and radical in spirit, only this time channelled through lush arrangements, greater lyrical clarity – not to mention longing – and warmly inviting harmonies. Although the first song is literally called ‘Disconnection’, the communal, strung-out energy feels lived-in as opposed to deconstructed through a computer, which was what the band mostly used to splice together Spirit World Tour. The new album, as blissfully disorienting as it is renewed with purpose, was recorded in a basement of an old home they rented where the wiring was so faulty they had to use acoustic instruments to avoid electric shocks. “You’re so puzzled/ Trying to believe in something/ On your own,” they sing on ‘Halogen’. But together? That’s a whole different world of possibilities.
We caught up with Sword II’s Certain Zuko for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about the influences behind Electric Hour, their upcoming tour, Guitar Hero, and more.
Are you excited about bringing the record to life on the stage?
We kind of have illusions of grandeur for the tour. At first we were like, we want to have three backup singers, and we wanna have another instrumentalist, and we want to bring eight people on the road. But it’s just so expensive to do. We want the live shows to just be really crazy. I just watched the musical My Fair Lady, I’m really into that right now. I never knew how good it was. When people come to our shows, it’s gonna be part noise-punk, part Britney Spears, part musical theater, part anarcho-punk. That’s gonna be what’s all happening.
Do you feel like that’s the intersection of all of your influences, or bits and pieces of what everyone brings to the table?
For me, I listen to a lot of hardcore and ’80s kind of punk music. Over the past couple of years – first, Travis was really into Avril Lavigne. Then he was really into The Weeknd. He’s also really into the new underground pop people – Snow Strippers, Frost Children, Basic Victim. I really like them, too. And then Mari’s always showing me literal show tunes. She likes that kind of shit, and real sultry singer-songwriter stuff, a little bit theatrical. There’s different electronic music that we all really like, too. We all really like Crystal Castles.
Do you find yourselves leaning into different aspects of them when you’re thinking about a live show, as opposed to making a record?
Totally. Basically, what we would do on the last record is we would be partying, and then we would go into the studio, and we would just record. Sometimes we would record parts a million times, but a lot of the parts we would actually just record until we got bored. And then we were like, “Okay, we’re done recording,” and we would just chop it up. We never were really songwriting like a band. But when we did the live shows, we wanted to play as a four-piece rock band, so it didn’t translate well to us all the time. It was just clunky to figure out how to play the songs. For this record, we knew we were gonna tour a lot, because we started touring after we did that last record, Spirit World Tour. So we were like, “We’re gonna tour a lot, so we should write songs that we can just hop out with on stage.” All the songs on our new record, it’s easy for us to play them and perform them, whereas before, we were trying to play these complicated parts that came from the computer. But on this album, we were reacting to our last album a little bit. I think on the next one, it might be like a synthesis.
The title of the album partly alludes to this feeling of having an hour to get your point across when you’re on stage. I’m curious if that feels more real or pertinent now that you’re actually conceptualizing the live show.
Originally, when we thought of the name Electric Hour, we were like, “The album should be one hour.” And honestly, if we had all the time in the world, I would have loved to make an album that was one hour. But we kind of wanted to just keep the ball rolling. There’s so many forms of social interaction that have actually just become like isolation, so I think when people all come into the room for a show and you’re gonna watch a band, it’s such a charged moment, because there’s less of that happening in the world. It raises the stakes a little bit, as far as what we want to do with the show. Whenever people are gathered in a big crowd, there’s kind of this magic of the crowd that’s the same as in a protest or a riot.
We all grew up playing Guitar Hero. It’s such a strange game, because you start off, and the first level is an “easy song,” and you’re in someone’s backyard. At the end of playing the song, it shows you that little list, and it’s like, “You guys made this much money, but you broke something, so you had to pay this, so you only made 100 bucks.” It’s this deeply fictionalized, funny thing. But I feel like we had a breakthrough one time when we were all playing it together, and we were like, “We love Guitar Hero, but the version of Guitar Hero that we’re playing is just real.” But instead of wanting to just be the stars or whatever, we’re like, “How do we create that energy? How do we create that energy within the crowd, in a way that’s not just doing a crazy guitar solo? How do we keep that energy that we try to bring to the crowd?”
Because there’s these moments where the whole world splits apart – someone burns a police precinct, or someone shuts down the highway – and it’s this mass feeling of power. Back in the day, the problems that would beset you on career mode is like: someone got too drunk and fucked up the set. But the 2025 career mode is like: nationalism and fascism is encroaching, COVID is shutting down all the venues, and you get kicked off the bill because you said “Free Palestine.” That’s actually the shit that you have to deal with now. When we go into the studio, we’re like, “Let’s make a hit. Let’s make a great song.” But to us, that means, “Let’s make something that crazy people and punks will think is good.”
The game is obviously also so tour-oriented. All the setbacks come to you when you’re on tour, not when you’re in the studio writing songs. You’re not getting electrocuted…
We thought about that, too, when we were getting electrocuted. We were like, “Damn, this is a fucking crazy level of Guitar Hero.” We also think about all of the artists that have come before us that faced political challenges because of their music or their views. Like, Pearl Jam was trying to fight Ticketmaster super hard. Even though it was kind of on a little bit of a liberal tip, they still really were trying to do that. There’s all these crust punk bands I like from the ‘80s, like Nausea, and they were squatting in the Lower East Side. All the great punk bands and rock bands that came before us – we want to continue that legacy of being like, “They’re trying to make us shut up, but we’re not going to.”
Do you think about how an album can channel that energy outside the context of a crowd or your identity as a band? If someone were to stumble upon Electric Hour with no knowledge of your backstory or your politics, how do you think these things come through?
That’s something we actually talked about a lot. We’re a little more esoteric than, like, Rage Against the Machine. I’m really inspired by MGMT, and when I was first listening to them, I was 12 years old. I didn’t even understand what they were talking about. On their first album, ‘Weekend Wars’, that song is kind of this post-apocalyptic meditation on modern society, how humans face these new challenges, and there’s not actually an easy, good, moral answer. And then I also think about the song ‘Congratulations’ – at one point, he says, “The sons and daughters of city officials attend demonstrations.” I don’t exactly know what he’s trying to say, but I always thought of that line as talking about the irony of being connected to political power but breaking away from it. Not to go too into the MGMT scholarship, but I think they were trying to say that people look for acceptance in different ways, and that sometimes undergirds things that are just presented as political.
When I was 13, I didn’t know what the fuck that meant. It just came on my iPod, the beats and melody were good. But then when I got older, I was like, “Damn.” I think that’s been a profound thing for me, to be able to go back to this part of myself that resonated so deeply with the sound and the emotion, and then being able to be like, “The world is actually this really dark and scary and complicated place.” When we go in and we do the lyrics, some of it we want people to get in the immediate term, but some of it, it’s kind of fine if people don’t necessarily understand it the first time they listen to it. The context might come later. You can’t just give someone a zine and be like, “Read this.” The world is more scary and evil than that.
Did you notice a shift in how you wrote lyrics compared to the first record or the elements you shared?
I think we all pushed each other to say things that we thought sounded… sexy? Because I think a lot of us have a tendency – especially if you listen to our very first EP, It’s very muted. With this one, we would be in the studio and be like, “Sing that louder.” Really push that line, or change the line to this so that it’s more clear. We didn’t really do that before this record. We were just kind of like, “That’s what you want to do, it sounds good.” But we knew each other so much better for this record that we were able to be like, “No, I know you got more.” I would be singing something, and there’s a couple songs where I just remember Travis being like, “Okay, that makes no sense. You don’t even know what you’re saying right now.” I think that helped. We pushed each other to have a little more clarity and confidence.
I’m sure the way your voices intertwine plays into this dynamic as well.
I think on the last album, we were like, “How weird of a sound can we make? How many crazy noises can we put into one song?” But then we realized, we’ve never actually used all our voices together and hear what that sounds like – this ancient way of making music, like a Greek chorus. We’re trying to be so in the future that we haven’t even explored this thing. It’s actually easy to go on the computer and be like, “I’m about to make the weirdest noise you ever heard.” It helps you find yourself, but you also don’t really have to look at yourself that hard. You’re just like, “I’m crazy.” We were like, “Let’s see what we can do in this mode.”
Silence is a recurring thing that comes up in a few songs – being “in silent company,” or the “silent dawn,” or “even if our spring would be silent.” Do you attach any significance to it?
It’s funny, I did not notice that until now. Honestly, that word has a nice musical quality. I think that’s part of it, and I feel like there’s a peacefulness to it, too. The “spring will be silent” line is supposed to be a reference to Silent Spring, which is a book by an environmentalist, Rachel Carson; basically, the spring is silent because the birds are dead, not coming alive.
Were there books that you were all reading at the same time? Was that part of your day-to-day life?
We all read a lot. We have a lot of friends that are poets, and we all like writing poetry that’s not lyrics. On the last album, me and Travis were really into this author, John Zerzan. He has a book, Running on Emptiness, where he’s basically like: All of civilization is a mistake. It’s totally random that we ended up here, and even language, human language, is a mistake. Or not a mistake, but an accident. There’s not this linear progression of history where humans are getting better or smarter – it’s actually just all these accidental things. We were really influenced by that wild nihilism – I don’t even know if that’s really nihilism, but criticism of everything. We were like, “We’re just gonna be weird as fuck, because we don’t care.” But then with this album, we were a lot more influenced by the political repression of the Stop Cop City movement, all the things that were written during the Stop Cop City movement. We were all reading together zines about how there’s all these layers of the government working together to collude to build a police training facility. It’s this shocking corruption. That would be the main thing literarily we were influenced by as a whole.
This record is definitely more wildly romantic than nihilistic, especially ending with ‘Even If It’s Just a Dream’. Why was it important for you to land on that note?
Honestly, part of why it’s the last song is really because the end is just so epic and long. There’s a 3-minute guitar solo. There’s this bliss, nut there’s something kind of fucked up about it. The longer that the guitar solo goes on – every time I listen to it, I’m kind of like, “I’m actually not really happy.” It’s almost haunting. That’s what we wanted it to feel like – it just keeps going.
A song that has a similar effect to me is ‘Halogen’, which has one of my favorite arrangements on the record. Do you remember putting it together?
That’s one of my favorite parts of the whole shit – the very end of that song. The piano’s going, the guitar solo, all these harmonies. We wanted to make something that was just ridiculously epic. I remember I was so happy when I first heard it with all the final instruments. We wanted to create that feeling of just bliss – escape.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Sword II’s Electric Hour is out now via section1.
