When Angel Christian was three years old, her parents became jail ministers and started travelling to prisons across Georgia, bringing her along. “One of my first core memories is standing on the ground floor of a prison ward and looking up at all of the exposed cells rising above me, with hundreds of men or women looking down and listening to me sing,” she says. She’d sing old hymns — “AmazingGrace” and the like — and inmates would throw down handmade jewelry woven from trash bags. She still has some of it.
That’s where Genuine Connection starts, even if the New York four-piece didn’t technically exist until about three years ago. Angel grew up in the mountains of North Georgia before moving to Chattanooga, Tennessee for high school. Pastor’s kid from age three to sixteen. Church choir, private Southern Baptist school choir — the whole arc. “It really made me fall in love with singing and it became such a huge therapeutic outlet for me,” she explains. And even though her family eventually split from the church, the residue stuck. “I still find my style of writing and singing to be a tad gospely. I repeat a lot of lyrics in my songs and I think that’s because I’m really trying to drive them home in a way.”
The band’s “I Swear” EP — five tracks sitting somewhere between 90s alt rock, indie, emo, grunge, and punk, angular and ethereal in the same breath — is out now digitally.
There’s a music video for “Swell” already floating around. The stuff was put together by Angel alongside Anais, Louis, and Adam, and if you know Aeryn Santillan from Massa Nera, she’s the one pushing this into inboxes right now.
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Angel moved to New York a little over eight years ago specifically to start a band. It didn’t happen fast. “It’s safe to say it did not immediately happen for me. I was starting from scratch and had to first secure a job to afford this expensive city. The first few years were nothing but working 2-3 jobs and making new friends.”
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She ended up in the middle of a big local scene, watching bands grow around her while waiting for her own thing to click. Then, roughly three years back, she started making music with Anais. “It felt so right from the beginning.” Anais brought in Louis and Adam. Angel admits being vulnerable with lyrics around two people she barely knew was nerve-wracking at first, but that dissolved quick. “They are two of the sweetest and respectful guys I’ve ever met and they are so open to everything musically.”
The lyrics on “I Swear” span nearly a decade in some cases — tucked between the pages of old notebooks, as Angel puts it, finally given a proper shape. They’re narrated by someone older looking back at loss, heartbreak, and the slow, ugly process of figuring yourself out.
The title track, “I Swear,” works like sarcasm set to music. Angel describes it as “the song version of someone asking ‘how are you?’ and you just respond with ‘I’m great! How are you?’ when that is not how you feel at all.” It started with her own feelings of abandonment tied to her dad but shifted when Anais’ grandmother — her best friend — passed away during the writing process. The grief became shared.
“This was also a turning point for us musically. I think it’s one of our most emotionally driven songs and it gives me goosebumps every time we play it.”
“Swell” stays with the dad thread, and it’s heavy. Angel’s parents were both told they couldn’t have kids. She arrived unexpectedly when they were in their late thirties and early forties — hence the name Angel. Her dad was her best friend. Then her mom divorced him the week of Angel’s eighteenth birthday, and both parents sold the house and moved away in opposite directions — mom back to Mobile, dad back to Atlanta.
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Angel stayed in Chattanooga alone, found a room on Craigslist, leaned on friends. Her dad spiralled. “He met some really shitty people and let them take advantage of his heartbreak and depression post divorce.”
He stopped visiting, would pass through town without telling her. At nineteen, things fell apart completely. He’s been incarcerated for the past eleven years. “It absolutely breaks my heart over and over again every day. We still talk on the phone and I’m actively trying to help him get his time reduced.”
The lyrics come from anger — the feeling that he chose his heartbreak over her — mixed with constant dissociation and disconnect from him, from herself, from everything.
“Flower” is about her friend Micah, who died in a car accident when Angel was a junior in high school. His older brother was driving, they were taking a left turn over a highway, and a car hit them head-on from the passenger side. Micah was reading a book and died instantly. A week before, he’d written an essay at school about feeling like he’d already lived a hundred years despite being only seventeen. “Micah was truly the most brilliant, selfless and timeless human being I have ever met.” The song splits in two structurally — the first half mirrors his life, meant to feel like a day in the sun, watching him light up. Then it takes a hard turn into his death. “He grew too fast for this world,” Angel says. “He was my beautiful, fucking Flower.”
“Peace” deals with unrequited love, or at least love with mismatched intensity. “It’s kind of like a conversation with yourself while also screaming into the void,” Angel explains. You’ve said everything you can say in every possible way, and the other person is still going to feel how they feel and do what they want. “It’s such a deep, sad feeling to know you can’t change something. You wish you could change how you feel about them in your heart and just walk away or you wish you could change how they feel about you and live happily ever after but as we all know, that is not how love works.”
“Red, Yellow, Green” has been kicking around the longest. The first couple of lines came to Angel back in 2018, when she was fresh to New York and fresh out of a breakup with the person she’d moved there with. “I was definitely indulging in lots of partying and hanging out with some people who definitely did not have my best interest in mind.” The song tracks the up-and-down cycle of that time — someone who’d vanish for days or weeks, then reappear like nothing happened, and everything would feel magical again. It’s become their best-received track at shows. “It’s super fun to scream together.”
Five songs, almost a decade of living behind them. Catchy choruses delivered through vocals that carry the unmistakable trace of hymns sung in prison wards and Baptist school auditoriums.
Genuine Connection doesn’t oversell the pain — they just lay it out, and trust the weight to land on its own. And it’s genuinely pleasant to listen.
