In November 2009, the members of Adelaide, Australia's Atlas Genius set about building a studio where they could write and record music for their newly formed band. For two years, brothers Keith, Steven, and Michael Jeffery devoted their days to constructing their dream studio and spent their nights performing songs by The Police, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones at local pubs to pay the bills. "We really got down and dirty with drywalling and literally laying the floorboards, and at the same time we were taking a couple of days a week to focus on writing songs," recalls Keith, Atlas Genius's vocalist/guitarist. The studio was designed and outfitted by the brothers with the help of their father (who comes from a music and engineering background). Once the studio was complete, the first song that Atlas Genius finished was a song called "Trojans," which they wrote, recorded and produced in collaboration with their friend Darren Sell. After many weeks tweaking the song, Michael insisted that the song was ready to be heard outside of the studio walls. Within an hour, "Trojans" was on SoundCloud for sale via TuneCore on iTunes, Amazon and Spotify worldwide.

Quickly named an iTunes Single of the Week in Australia and New Zealand, "Trojans" reached #4 on Hype Machine by the end of May. In August, SiriusXM Satellite Radio's Alt-Nation discovered the song on a blog and decided to give it some spins. There was an immediate reaction from listeners, and in September, "Trojans" was placed into heavy rotation, where it maintained a top-five position on the listener-generated Alt-18 countdown and peaked at number one for 4 consecutive weeks in January 2012. "Trojans" began selling over a thousand tracks per week on U.S. iTunes and soon climbed to 40,000 sales -- all with zero promotional efforts from the still-unsigned Atlas Genius.

For us Nico Vega is a way of life. We are 3 people who play music together. We write as a band and help each other develop our ideas. The root of the music is the relationship between us. Nico Vega is about collaboration. We are a family and we honor each other by listening and allowing each other to grow. We push each other to be better and to carry each other when we feel weak.

Nico Vega represents a modern day saint. A warrior that has led us to a more fulfilling, lighter way of being. She represents people and unity. She fights for all of us and teaches us to fight for each other. She is an idea that has evolved into a message and she fuels us in our bellies. She is the person we are all capable of being, but she holds the bar high above our head so that we must reach to be better human beings. We all have honesty inside of us, we all know how to love, we are all made of the same flesh, and we are all stuck here together. Nico Vega reminds us that we can learn to fuse these ideas together and grow more solid as a unit of man. Alone we are lost, we fail, we grieve, we search, we struggle, we feel small. Together we are solid, found, loved, and powerful. We are our own greatest natural resource. Our ego falls away when we listen to each other. It is when we stop believing that we can learn from one another that we stop learning altogether. Only then are we alone. We are no different from each other; the same flesh, the same pain, the same love, the same heart. Our greatness is no threat. The more beautiful we are individually, the more powerful we are together. It is our Ego that betrays and lies and tells us that we are threatened when we are not.

You are a part of our family and we will always make music to communicate our love and gratitude for you. If you come to our show, throw your hands up so we can feel you... you will feel us.