feeble little horse makes thrilling and wildly unpredictable songs that are a reflection of the joys that come with making music with your best friends. The Pittsburgh quartet’s sophomore album, Girl with Fish, which is out June 9 via Saddle Creek, was made focusing on intuition over intention: letting the magic of collaboration come first. “Anything that makes us laugh or puts a smile on our faces, we usually end up keeping in the songs,” explains drummer Jake Kelley. Across 11 self-recorded and self-produced tracks, the band careens from blissed-out pop to harsh noise, glitchy programmed drum beats, and off-kilter indie rock—sometimes all in one song. As a follow-up to their critically acclaimed 2021 debut Hayday, this LP, with its overwhelmingly inviting and emotionally resonant tracklist, is a document of four people trusting their instincts and most importantly each other.

The enigmatic Atlanta-based three-piece outfit, Sword II, share their debut album Spirit World Tour – a snapshot into the collective’s shared seminal life experiences over the past three years, with potent lyrics that explore refusal, love and rage, degenerates, fluidity, life force and psychological warfare. Starting their journey playing DIY and experimental shows across Atlanta, Sword II have built up a sonic arsenal of boundary pushing music and combining it with politically-charged lyrics.

Recorded between 2020-2022 at their Lakewood, Atlanta basement studio, which is located a few houses down from The Dungeon, where The Dungeon Family and Outkast made their first records, one of the band’s biggest sources of inspiration, Spirit World Tour was created over a period of unprecedented times across America and the world. “The album title came to us because we were experimenting with a lot of different styles of music and ways of recording, especially during the pandemic & uprising year of 2020,” explains the band. “That whole summer we were just immersed in that climate, making friends with people on the street, bringing generators and speakers to demonstrations, washing tear gas from our eyes. And then when we would finally go back home, finally to make music, we had a whole new perspective on how we wanted to do things.”

Formed in 2018, Mari González (they/them – bass and vocals), Certain Zuko (she/her – guitar and vocals) and Travis Arnold (he/him – guitar and vocals) make up the band – each member coming from different backgrounds within the ATL music scenes. Spirit World Tour was born out of years worth of sessions that were 100% experimental, where guitars would be changed to synths, and then back, real drum kits forged into electronic ones, and speeding up and warping pretty much anything they could get their hands on, the album slowly began to take its shape. The result is a cohesive record that effortlessly glides in and out of ruthless punk to unsettling noise and pop sensibilities.