Arising from the cigarette ashes of a fallen lounging lothario, David and Matthew formed Atomic Energy Commission in April 2018. David’s outer limits guitar style and Matthew’s primitive rhythms found an easy and productive rapport, and soon after they enlisted Tom Parsons on bass. Within a few months, the trio played their first show at a street party outside David’s record shop in South Minneapolis. After that they hit many of the Southside’s venues, even opening for the film The Exorcist and bringing their own visuals to their performance for the first time. With a solid setlist under their belt, they wanted to capture these songs as a document of their current sound. After a year of recording, mixing, and waiting, their debut 12” EP, Post Fax Nation, came out in February 2020, a month before the pandemic would shut down the world.

Quarantine kept the band apart but they remained active, trading files online for what would become their follow-up EP. Their sound shifted noticeably under the circumstances yet their working methods proved just as fruitful. Reflecting the context of its creation, the EP was named AECPWMCTEP‍, the AEC ‘Person Woman Man Camera Television’ EP after the orange clown’s laughable cognition test, and was released in early 2021 on the same day the orange clown got the boot. Yet even as quarantine restrictions began to lift and vaccines became widely available, the trio never played another show after an impromptu pandemic-inspired livestream in March 2020. Logistics and existing health issues put an end to this incarnation of the band, and their final release as such, the “Radiation 1, 2” 7”, came out at the end of 2021.

David and Matthew continued as duo, pre-recording Matthew’s drums to use as backing trackings so that Matthew could step out from behind the kit and play rhythm guitar to ground David’s wild space explorations. Again their methodology changed yet their chemistry remained intact. Before long, they had more material than they knew what to do with and made their live debut as a duo in April of 2022. They played shows around Minneapolis and later went on a short tour to road test their new songs. Returning from that tour, they began to focus on recording a full-length album, using their pre-recorded drum tracks as its foundation.

Matthew’s sister Melissa attended a show in Chicago and afterwards suggested they add a keyboard to their line-up. In turn they said she should take up that instrument and join them. She demurred but then made the same suggestion again a year later. The band again asked her to join, and this time she accepted. By this time, the band had accumulated two dozens songs and had almost finished recording their album. To accommodate Melissa’s addition to the group, they wrote synthesizer parts for all their songs with the intention that Melissa would play them. This new trio made its live debut in October 2025 and released its first single, Microdose 1, in April 2026. This marked AEC’s first new music since “Radiation 1, 2.” Microdose 2 is the next warm up for the album, to be released later in 2026, with the band’s full-length debut to follow shortly thereafter. Beyond that, the future remains unwritten.