Atria.0 is a metallic shoegaze project formed by Dayton Hammontree from Chattanooga, TN.
How did you get started making music?
I first started playing guitar when I was 13, on a short injury rest from baseball. I didn’t pick up baseball after that. I started wanting to form a band about 2 years later, and initially, I wanted to form this big Nu/Death Metal band cause I was listening to a lot of Slipknot at the time, but it was impossible to find other people. Eventually, I heard bands like Godflesh, who use a drum machine and only have 2 members, so I settled on just trying to find a bassist first. Eventually, I found Jurnee and Atria.0 started.
Where are you from and how has that influenced your music?
I’m from Chattanooga. We’re not a big music city, as much as our government wants to be the next Nashville, even more so when I started out. Outside of hardcore, our main scene at the time I felt was a lot of sludge/doom bands or contemporary classic rock so in my mind I went, “I don’t want to do that.” There also weren’t many, if any, all ages venues I could get to, so that made us not really play any shows cause Jurnee and I were still minors. There aren’t too many music shops in town, and none of them sell strings for my Bass VI, so for the first 3-4 years of Atria.0 I was using the same strings for it.
What does your name mean and how did you decide on it?
The name comes my freshman year of high school when my friend, who wasn’t too familiar with metal, asked how grindcore bands choose their names. We were in health class at the time so I said something like, “typically by just finding a cool sounding word in a health book,” and then I pointed to the word, “atria.” After that I drew a little spiky logo that I never used but the name stuck for when I made a band. The atria are the two upper chambers of the heart that receive blood from the veins and then pump them out into the ventricles, so it’s kinda metal. When we started, there was only one other band with music you could find with the name Atria and they were defunct so we took the name but we switched the name to Atria.0 in July of 2023 when we started putting our music on Spotify. We found out a bunch of bands had either formed since then or had started archiving their old music that were all named Atria and it was a pain in the ass to get music uploaded to the right place so we switched. There were like 12 bands with that name at that point.
Vale Ad Amicos is Atria.0’s self-produced sophomore album and first as a solo project since the departure of founding bassist Jurnee Williams. Unsure where to take the project, Dayton used their time late at night in their cold college dorm reflecting through music on the impact and influence Jurnee not only had on the band, but on their life as a whole and what her absence would mean for the future. These sessions of therapeutic drones and walls of sound quickly turned into writing sessions for a new album to explore the anger, sadness, confusion, remorse, and other feelings that loss can morph into and manifest in someone.
These reflections on loss could not have been more poignant as soon after, a friend, that Dayton wishes they were closer to, took her own life, which led to them turning deeper into music and trying to explore their feelings and cope with their newfound loss and regret over the situation. This manifested into the single “Birdsong”: a track named after her and dedicated to her memory. A somber lament wishing they could have been closer so maybe none of this would have happened but hoping that her memory will live on within the birds who sing her name every day.
What or Who are your biggest inspirations?
I don’t think this project would exist in its current form without Jason Broadrick and Godflesh. Streetcleaner really opened my eyes to drum machines in heavier music and I had never really heard it used like that before and not sound cheesy. Jesu is also a big inspiration, especially their Silver EP. Bands like My Bloody Valentine, Hum, Deadguy, and Converge are also bands I reference in various aspects of my music. With Converge, vocalists like Jacob Bannon and Connie Sgarbossa of SeeYouSpaceCowboy have really shaped my vocal delivery. I also listen to a lot of Fugazi and Morphine, which helps get the creativity flowing. For some more modern bands, Frail Body, Poorly Wrote Suicide Note, The Callous Daoboys, and Wulven all inspire me. The album “Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt” by John Frusciante is also big for me. Every time I listen to that album, I write a song right after. I should probably cut myself off though cause I could talk about this for days.
Any upcoming projects?
This just came out, but we have a song on BSDJ’s “Even then my lights do not fade” compilation and all the proceeds go to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. There’s some stuff, new music and remasters, planned for my side project, Infected Vasectomy, but as for Atria.0, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get around to making that Acoustic Noise release
How do you think you’ve grown since you started making music?
To me, the opening track to the last album says a lot: Stop Calling Us Metal. While we’ve always had shoegaze influences, we were taking a lot more from metal and hardcore for a while. I feel like, for the most part, the metal that’s still there is just the screaming and that’s cause I can barely sing. I think just naturally the music has gotten a lot tighter and more unique. I started this project when I was about 15 and barely knew how to play, write, or record, and now that I’ve been doing that stuff more frequently, it’s gotten better, especially my screams. Some of those early releases I can’t even listen to.
What message do you want listeners to take away from “Vale Ad Amicos”?
Love your friends while you can and love yourself enough to recognize when someone’s love is harming you.
What’s the most surprising or rewarding experience of your career so far?
Definitely being played on Brazilian radio. Pedro from Shoegazer Alive featured Squatter on his internet radio show, and, as an American, hearing your song being played on Brazilian radio is just surreal. I don’t know how big of an impact it has made in terms of our growth or whatever, but that feeling when I heard it being played was worth it.
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