Breaking onto the scene in 2022 with debut full-length ‘Never Before Seen, Never Again Found’, Arm’s Length have never shied away from the uglier side of human existence. Led by frontman Allen Steinberg, their opening gambit came as a frantic purge of pent-up emotion, but on album two the Ontarian emo outfit are trading in wide-eyed desperation for something far more composed.
The product of real-time reckoning and bleak honesty, ‘There’s A Whole World Out There’ is an album that embraces growth and grief in equal measure, reopening old wounds not to wallow in them – but to better understand their shape. Dramatic, devastating, and deeply sincere, it’s a record shaped by the lingering ache of watching the world burn, yet blanketed by the peculiar comfort that comes with knowing you’re the one holding the match,
Rock Sound caught up with Allen to talk about Arm’s Length’s biggest statement to date, their growing confidence as musicians, and the strength in learning to coexist with your pain.
Rock Sound: ‘There’s A Whole World Out There’ feels like both a continuation of the path you were on with your debut and a huge turning point for Arm’s Length. When did you realise that this was going to be a different kind of record?
Allen Steinberg: With ‘Never Before Seen, Never Again Found’, I thought that was going to be the only record we ever got to put out. With that album, I scraped the bottom of the barrel to collect all of the ideas I had, and I fleshed them out into real songs. It was essentially me doing anything I could to get one album out, because that was my biggest dream. I thought that the biggest achievement that could happen to Arm’s Length was to release one album that some people found to be meaningful or impactful, and that was my only dream.
Now, everything is a bonus, and this sophomore record feels like we’ve been given an entirely new lease on life. I wouldn’t say that hopefulness is the main theme of the record, but there are certainly moments that recognise that it’s not all doom and gloom. It’s a different kind of yearning than on our debut, and it let us do things that we didn’t get to do with ‘Never Before Seen…’. There are a lot of ballads on that record, and those are still there on this new record because I love writing those songs, but we’ve gotten more energetic too. That new lease on life brought us this youthful spirit, and on some of these songs we got to experiment with going heavier. We’ve always liked having that post-hardcore element to our sound, and this album let us dive into those themes a little more. Ultimately, I think we had more fun writing this record. We didn’t write it completely as a unit, but Jeff [Whyte, drums] and I primarily wrote the record together. When we were writing it, it was clear that we were just better at our instruments and our craft now, and we felt more in our element than ever before. We had more fun, and that translates into the sound of the record. It feels more us, which is cool.
RS: A big difference in the process of creating the two records is that the debut was primarily formed of ideas you’d had written and banked for a while. You’d been able to sit with those thoughts and feelings for some time before recording, but this album required you to rely on your present self a little more…
Allen: That’s exactly what it was. I had to do a lot of things from scratch, and I had to trust in my ability to write more than ever. There were songs that were pretty stream of consciousness, but I didn’t rush the album at all. I had months to write it, and I was unemployed, so I could just focus on the record all day. That was awesome, but I had to trust myself not to think too hard about the lyrics. Some of my favourite lines I’ve ever written are on this record, and that’s because I didn’t second guess them too much. There are songs that maybe aren’t as poetic as the ones on our debut, and I was definitely blunter in my lyrics this time. That can be jarring, and a lot of these songs don’t beat around the bush at all. It’s more blatant, and I think people have been able to relate to those tracks more. They’re still poetic, but they’re more in your face. You know what the songs are about.
RS: For any artist that’s naturally driven to pour so much of themselves into their art, there’s that worry of sharing too much. You can worry about getting too personal, or sharing things that further down the line you’d wish you hadn’t… Is that anxiety something you’ve felt?
Allen: A little, yes. My first shot at being extremely personal was on ‘Never Before Seen…’, especially on ‘Overture’. There’s a lyric in that song that says, ‘A face only a mother could love // But she can hardly even look at her son’. I remember writing that and thinking, ‘That’s so fucking sad’. I experimented with those jarring, personal lines on the first album, and people really seemed to resonate with them. Going into this record, that gave me the green light to go more into it. I remember talking to our producer Anton [DeLost], telling him the vibe I had in mind for the record. We wanted to be a little bit more dynamic as a band, getting heavier, but also softer and a little rawer at times. We were talking about how we could achieve that, and he told me that I had to write lyrics that were even more gruesome and personal than before. That was a tall task, because I wrote like an open book on the first record, but he was right. I had to get in touch with myself and how I was feeling in the present moment. I was 24 when I wrote most of the lyrics on this record, and your mid-twenties are a transitional period of your life. That’s pretty apparent in these lyrics, because both the future and the past are in there.
RS: When you’re going through that process, it helps when you have someone like Anton on your side. You’ve built up a relationship and level of trust with him over the years, so what does he bring out in your songwriting?
Allen: He’s Canadian, and we built a relationship when we were kids. We were 20 when we first started working with him, and he had a studio in Toronto at the time. He was a little bit hard on us at first, but we’ve seen upwards growth with every release we’ve had with Anton. He’s super unserious, but also incredibly serious at the points where it matters, and he’s great at getting the best takes out of all of us.
When I was calling producers to get a feel of who would be good for this record, Anton was the only one who brought up my writing and how I need to go more personal. He was tracing the success of this record back to the skeleton of the songs, which is something that no other producer really talked about. We’re better musicians now, and we’re more professional. We were able to confidently tell Anton about how we wanted to focus more on guitar tone, and he was very open to whatever we wanted to do. He had that trust in us, and that meant a lot. He brings out the best in all of us.
RS: When we’re talking about the character of this record, we’ve got to talk about the banjo that’s prominently featured on the likes of ‘The Wound’ and ‘You Ominously End’. How did that come about?
Allen: Since the last album, we haven’t been shy about adding in different instruments. In ‘Everything As I Knew It’ there’s mandolin, and there’s violin on a lot of the slower songs. We knew we wanted that on this record too, because our sound is the same as a lot of other bands at its core. When I write a song, I know that it sounds like ten other songs, so we try to distinguish ourselves in ways that other bands don’t.
Different instruments are a part of that, and when I had the original idea for ‘You Ominously End’ saved in my voice memo app it was named ‘Banjo Song’. I always thought that riff lent itself to a bluegrass vibe, so we rented a banjo from the local music store. We were just fucking around on it, but it sounded really cool, so we pressed record. In a couple of hours, we had the intro for the song done. The banjo is actually on five songs across the record, but it’s mostly used in a way that’s not particularly jarring. It’s not there for silly shock value, it just sounds cool. We play it like a guitar, and that brings a nice change of pace. We also used piano for the first time on this record, which is most apparent on ‘Attic’, ‘The Wound’, and ‘Morning Person’.
RS: Sticking with ‘You Ominously End’, that’s also a unique moment on the record because it plays with fiction a lot more than the other tracks. As a lyricist, what was that like?
Allen: For me, that song channels ‘Your Deep Rest’ by The Hotelier, which is also rooted in an imagined scenario. It was so fun to write, which is odd to say when it’s such a depressing one, but I really got in touch with the emotions that I was feeling. I was thinking about all of my mentally ill friends, and I felt guilty for not checking in on them enough. It sounds really fucked up, but I have this fear that one of my friends is going to die. It’s this haunting fear that I have, and it traces back to the guilt of not reaching out to them and being a better friend. That song is about someone I would die for, but that I don’t speak to enough because of distance or the fact that we’re always busy. It’s about knowing that someone is going through some shit, but for whatever reason, you can’t really reach out to them. I grew up in a small town with a pretty big friend group, so that song also channels some small-town shit. It’s a love letter to my friends who I don’t want to die, but it’s mostly narrative-based.
RS: We’ve talked a lot about the journey between albums one and two, especially in the way the songs approach your pain. Do you feel like you’re more at peace with your past now, or just more equipped to talk about it?
Allen: That is such a great question, and I think the honest answer is both. I’m 25 now, so my frontal lobe is fully cooked. I think I’m smarter, and I’m able to not be so frantic in the moment. There are still some anxious songs on this album, but the way I talk about it is definitely more mature. I feel more equipped to talk about those things, but it’s with a different tone. A lot of the things I’m talking about are the same on this album, I’m just talking about them differently. I feel like we have a new purpose now, and a chance to release an actual record with Arm’s Length. All I care about is recording, being in the studio, and making records. I’m so happy to have a second chance to do this, and I hope that shows in the songs.
RS: When we’re talking about the overall message of this album, ‘Morning Person’ is such a perfect way to end things. It revisits a lot of the trauma, but it also reaches some sort of closure… There’s this comforting feel to it, despite there not being a full resolution. How important was it for you to end the album on that note?
Allen: That is exactly what it is. It’s an acceptance that shit is always going to be fucked, and that mantra has played a big role in my life. I grew up with debilitating OCD, and the knowledge that it’s okay to have bad thoughts and that it’s okay for things to be fucked is important. It’s kind of nihilistic, but if I didn’t think that way…. Honestly, I reckon I’d kill myself. The last line of that song is, ‘I said I’d die for you and I’m sure that I will // On any day I may pass // In any way I am killed’. No matter what, that’s going to happen… I’m going to die. It’s not directly about death, but whatever happens, happens… And that’s okay.
RS: There’s no denying that ‘There’s A Whole World Out There’ is a sad record, but there’s resilience within these songs too. It’s almost an acknowledgment that whilst all of this darkness can exist, we can still find ways to keep going…
Allen: I think that comes from how all of our music sounds triumphant. On this record, there are songs like ‘Palinopsia’, ‘Early Onset’ and ‘Morning Person’, and there are older songs like ‘Muscle Memory’ and ‘Overture’… They all sound like they could be on the Inception soundtrack. They’re triumphant and have these crescendos that build, and that lends itself to the theme of resiliency. I think the placement of certain lines in these songs also make it seem like there’s an acceptance on this record. ‘The Wound’ is about how to stay alive after wanting to die for so long, and in ‘The Weight’ there’s the line, ‘I’ve seen the shape of my shadow shrink and expand over time // But it proves that there’s still light”. There was no glimmer of hope on the last record, but there might be a couple of glimmers on this one.
RS: This time around, there have obviously been a few more eyes and ears on Arm’s Length in the lead up to the record’s release. How do you reckon with that?
Allen: I’m not a recluse, and I think I have a decent idea about what people will find cool and relatable. I have my finger on the pulse with that, but I don’t feel as though I have any responsibility to the fans. I write music in the most selfish way imaginable, because it’s solely for myself. I realised what means a lot to me whilst writing this record, and I reconnected with the person I want to be, the things like, and what I care about. It’s a love letter to myself, the shit I’ve been through, my friends and family, and a reflection on my life. I don’t think about the fans at all, until we play shows. That’s the part which gives me a chance to connect with them. It’s beautiful and special, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. When I’m writing songs though, I don’t fucking care about anyone except myself.
RS: With these songs being released into the world now, how are you feeling about what the future holds for Arm’s Length?
Allen: Honestly, it’s scary. No part of us could have imagined this project going this far, and music is now our full-time job. That’s insane to say, and we’re astonishingly grateful that anyone cares about us and what we do. When a fan comes up to me and says, ‘This band changed my life’… I don’t know how to process that. It’s a lot of pressure, but I’m so thankful to be in a position where I can do that. It doesn’t feel like any of us were meant for this, but we’re eternally grateful. We’re from a small town in Canada, and now it seems like there may be a long road ahead for us. We’re trying to take it in our stride, but honestly, we already feel like we’re in over our heads. It’s not like we’re becoming the biggest band in the world, we’re just a fucking emo band, but it’s still huge for us. We grew up loving this genre, and we just want to make ourselves proud, our families proud, and the emo bands that we rip off proud. None of this was meant to happen, so we just want to rock whilst we still can.
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