HeartattaCk once nailed Antioch Arrow as “a roar of nothing.” That still works. The San Diego band were too weird for a lot of hardcore people in the early 90s, too wired to sit neatly inside emo, and too tied to Gravity Records to be separated from that city’s short, messy, deeply influential run of first-wave screamo and post-hardcore.
Numero Group have now announced “Your Hearts Belong To Us“, catalogued as NUM222, a 39-minute LP collecting Antioch Arrow’s complete Gravity recordings for the first time.
The set brings together “In Love With Jetts“, with two previously unissued outtakes, “The Lady Is A Cat” 12″, the Candle split, and two live Che Cafe tracks from the band’s five-piece period. In total, it runs to 23 tracks, remastered from corroded DATs, annotated by Tony Rettman, and packaged with lyrics, photos, flyers, and a gatefold jacket.
The release date is September 18. Pre-orders and streaming links are live now, with shipping information pointing to August in the order notes and September 18 on the store listing.
Antioch Arrow formed in San Diego in the summer of 1992, coming out of a local hardcore world that was already starting to turn against its own rules. Bassist Mac Mann and guitarist Aaron Richards were North County skateboarders pulling from D.C. emotional hardcore, especially Rites of Spring, Fury, and Ignition, while also taking in the broken guitar language of Drive Like Jehu. The early line-up included Aaron Montaigne on vocals, Mac Mann on bass, Maxamillion Avila (also credited as Ron Avila or Ron Anarchy) on drums, and Aaron Richards and Jeff Winterberg on guitar.
By their own account, the band had bigger ideas than their hands could fully handle at first, which is probably why those records still sound so nervous and alive. The songs lurch, sprint, fall over, get back up, and keep the vocals close to panic without turning into simple hardcore speed. “The Lady Is A Cat” still has one foot in fast, clipped punk, while “In Love With Jetts” pushes further into broken guitar shapes and theatrical tension.
That theatrical side was never just in the recordings. Antioch Arrow had an odd fixation on 1960s Mod fashion and iconography, thrift-store sharpness, and the idea that a hardcore show could be more than people standing around with arms folded. Aaron Richards put it plainly in Tony Rettman’s telling: “we wanted to create an experience that was more than just standing around watching a band.” Some early shows happened in an abandoned meth lab and a since-shuttered pool hall, which says enough about how loose the conditions were.
They recorded “The Lady Is A Cat” and “In Love With Jetts” at Doubletime Studios, then toured the country through van trouble, hostile hardcore-zine reactions, and line-up movement. Andy Ward replaced Aaron Richards on guitar for “In Love With Jetts”, bringing the band further away from straight hardcore and closer to the stranger sound that later came through on “Gems Of Masochism”, their final record, released after the band had already fallen apart. Three One G later reissued that album and places it as the point where Antioch Arrow moved into something darker, with synths, cabaret-like turns, and a gothic-punk streak that did not go over cleanly at the time.
That delay in understanding is part of the story. Antioch Arrow were dismissed by some scene gatekeepers while they were active, but their fingerprints are easy to hear in what followed: The Locust, The Blood Brothers, At The Drive-In, and a whole branch of bands that made hardcore more theatrical, more jagged, and less obedient to its own uniform. Rettman puts it well in the notes: “the very qualities that distanced them from the hardcore scene were revealed as an enduring contribution.”
There is plenty of old Antioch Arrow footage floating around too, including a 1994 clip from Senseless Beauty Cafe in Columbia, South Carolina. The band’s live presence makes more sense when you know Richards was thinking about The Who smashing instruments and treating rock performance as something physical and artsy at once. “We saw how they were mixing artsy performance and identified with it,” he said.
Tracklist:
A1. “Angels Lawn”
A2. “The Puppy Love”
A3. “Chaos vs Cosmos”
A4. “Space Age”
A5. “This Great Wall”
A6. “Somba”
A7. “Antioch Gold For You”
A8. “The Blessed Test”
A9. “Suspicious Uzi”
A10. “Picnic Pants” (Live at Che Cafe)
A11. “Antioch Gold For You” (Live at Che Cafe)
A12. “The Suspicious Uzi” (Unreleased Recording)
A13. “This Great Wall” (Unreleased Recording)
B1. “Conspiring The Go-Go”
B2. “Lightning Bolt”
B3. “Ain’t My Day”
B4. “The Fixed Orbit”
B5. “The Guardian Angel”
B6. “Kluts On Broadway”
B7. “Teenage Debutaunt And The Debutaunt Ball”
B8. “Stilts”
B9. “Times Square”
B10. “The Fixed Orbit” (7″ Version)
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