Album Review: Arm's Length - 'There's a Whole World Out There'
Canadian four-piece expand horizons with sophomore, ‘There's a Whole World Out There’.
When Arm's Length broke through their Ontario and into the Eastern Hemisphere with their softly-spoken feature-length debut of "Never Before Seen, Never Again Found," in 2022 a whole new talent pool was found amongst western emo noise - and with it, came an equally incensed posse of fans who waited on baited breath.
Following the trajectory of The Story So Far and saturdays at your place, Arm's Length hit the ground running with delicately decisive, "Object Permanence" and an honest washing with "Tough Love" with equally bumper-pack years to follow, which featured the bands' first headliner shows in America and Canada aswell as feature slots at UK's Slam Dunk Festival across the pond.
For a project that once was a mere catharsis exercise, the band finally release their second record to their now devoted following, "There's a Whole World Out There" - a bursting self-reflective feeling of dealing with parts of your life that have been and gone.
The record, mostly written in the Summer of 2024, largely reflect on a three-year period back when the band were tracking their debut, where lyricist and frontman Allen Steinberg was at its most rock bottom. An album bludgeoned with the importance of acceptance amongst trauma, it permeates to and fro from devastating to delicate in true Arm's Length fashion as there are emotive check-ins throughout it's 12-track tenure.
“I had the songs for the last record,” Steinberg explains, “since I was basically a teenager, but I had to write all of these ones fresh. So it speaks more to my life at the moment than the past, even though there’s still a good amount of past on it. But it's how I'm dealing with it now, as opposed to being enveloped in it—there's more a sense of being on the other side of it, of seeing it with hindsight. It's still definitely a sad record, but I feel like the tone has shifted a little. I'm probably just a bit more mature, as my frontal lobe is developing as we speak.”
From the off, the record is doesn't muster any attempt to hold itself back. Heady opener The World teeters between feeling alive all the while conscious that everything is also always lost at a moments' notice, "I am self aware, and that's what makes me scared / Don't breathe before I analyse the air." While Funny Face tells a visceral narrative of losing those most cherished, You Ominously End shares the fear of a friend who attempts to take their own life. A song soaked in raw emotion but playing up to a sense of black humour with some banjo playing, it pushes Arm's Length lyrical honesty into overdrive with an equally feral spine of tribal percussion and that dense wall of guitar; all the more emotive than the last.
The records' more obvious moments of delicate comes with the pause of Early Onset, its stirring strings and acoustic pickings bring together a beautiful narrative surrounding illness and loss. Attic is another stalwart, echoing one of the albums' thesis of losing of memories old. Before long, we're awash with the full scale with Genetic Lottery, a searing jolt towards childhood nostalgia - often an easy subject of talk within midwest emo works. Almost in line with the tender narrative of Steinberg discovering himself, the ultimate acceptance comes amongst those waves of devastating crescendos.
The most hard-hitting comes in the form of the last track here. A densely-packed 6-minute outpouring, Morning Person offers a recap on the albums' main themes - vulnerability, resilience and acceptance are all on show here. It's the bands' most inventive throughout their time and is a relief to hear that they've saved the best till last.
Powerful and equally devastating, Arm's Length and their new number is a contributing example in which another band breaks the sophomore album curse.
To celebrate the release of their sophomore record, the band are taking the album on the road with 5 shows in their favourite cities in June, but not before finishing off their main tour with Washington's 9:30 Club and Albany's Empire Live on the roster. Meanwhile, a bit closer to the home, Arm's Length will return to the UK and Europe in February of 2026. The band are set to cap off a magic chapter with performances in Leeds' The Key Club and London's 02 Academy in Islington.
Words by Alex Curle
