Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
Photo by Tessa Smith
Arms Length was never supposed to get this far. The Ontario four-piece–Allen Steinberg, Jeff Whyte, Jeremy Whyte, and Ben Greenblatt–will release their second album, There’s a Whole World Out There, next month through Pure Noise Records, a prospect that would’ve been unthinkable for the band when they began. Arms Length “didn’t even want to tour, originally, just maybe rip some local shows,” Steinberg tells me early in our conversation. They aren’t wasting their chance; There’s a Whole World Out There pushes outward in every direction on the foundation laid down on 2022’s Never Before Seen, Never Again Found.
Nearly half the record features prominent banjo, and the record includes both Arms Length’s softest, most precious–or just delicate–songs to date (“Palinopsia,” “Early Onset”) as well as their most aggressive (“You Ominously End,” “Halley”), plus their longest song yet in the seven-minute closer “Morning Person.” As ever, Steinberg’s lyrics cut deep, achieving a sort of universality in his hyperspecificity. He touches on his usual themes–mental illness, nostalgia, intergenerational trauma–with self-deprecating humor and, for the first time, a touch of hard-won optimism. “Your younger self would be so proud,” Steinberg spits on the chorus of “Fatal Flaw” and, however tongue-in-cheek he might’ve meant it, Arms Length has reason to feel some pride.
The Alt spoke with Steinberg about his relationship with emo, the band’s stratospheric rise, and what to expect from There’s a Whole World Out There.
It feels like you’ve gotten pretty massive pretty quickly. I know you’ve spoken before about not expecting the band to go anywhere outside your hometown. What’s that felt like for you?
It’s extremely fulfilling. It’s the most fulfilling thing ever for us. There’s no words, and it sounds corny, but I’ve already achieved everything I set out to do in music, let alone in the emo space. Since I was a teenager I literally wanted to do just one album. When I started to understand what it meant to listen to a full record–my favorite album ever is Home Like Noplace Is There–I made it such a priority to make an album that hopefully had a lasting impact. When I got into those albums–the Empire! Empire! one, Loma Prieta, Pianos Become the Teeth, Castevet’s Summer Fences–I got obsessed with emo, and I wanted to do that. Even though we sound polished, we’re definitely real emo fans.
Were you a SophiesFloorboard guy?
Yeah! That’s an Ontario website too, which I didn’t know until they featured us.
That’s the real sign that you’ve made it. That’s a milestone.
To be so honest, getting on SophiesFloorboard is even cooler than signing to a label. We’re from a hick town. I had a group of five people in high school who all used SophiesFloorboard. We found Grandview through there! Jeremy and Jeff grew up more on the post-hardcore side–Coheed, that stuff–but I grew up on pop-punk like Sum 41. I got into that Being as as Ocean stuff, Counterparts, and I love that shit. Ben got into a lot of that same stuff too.
You’ve played with some pretty significant established bands by this point too. Is it at all strange playing with bands like that–like Silverstein, New Found Glory–who are big and are established but maybe aren’t operating in the same space as you guys?
Well, we did three shows with New Found Glory, and those are the three worst shows we’ve ever played. It was obviously sick that we got to do them, but we were awful. I don’t think we made fans on that. Silverstein was full circle thing for us. They’re Canadian, and Discovering the Waterfront was big for me. It’s cool. I tried to win over the crowd there. With the Origami Angel tour we did there’s a huge overlap in our fanbases so I didn’t need to win over the crowd. With Silverstein, with that crowd, there’s something cool in trying to impress a crowd of thirty- and forty-year-olds. I like playing for people who have $200 to drop on merch! I like the elder emos. Shit, I was listening to The Pine when I was 13. I totally get it. If some oldhead wants to talk to me about On the Might of Princes after the show, that’s fucking cool. I’ll yawn when you say we sound like The Appleseed Cast, but it’s cool. The Silverstein tour was 25 years of them being a band, and only Ben was 25 when we did that–but I welcome anyone who gives a shit about our band–almost anyone. If you’re a chill individual, if you’re not demonic, come to the show.
You guys have been playing “Funny Face” live since that tour with Silverstein. What’s the reception been like?
Really good. If you’re going by Spotify, it’s streaming well! It’s our third most-streamed. It was a wakeup call for me that Never Before Seen, Never Again Found made such an impact in this space. “Tough Love,” “Object Permanence,” “Muscle Memory,” they all stream fucking crazy, and “Funny Face” is getting its fair share. It’s weird! But all our singles, at least on Spotify, have had weird trajectories. “Object Permanence” is our number one on there by a fucking mile, but when we released it, it took a lot of time. I remember it didn’t get any playlisting at all. I was very confident that should’ve been the lead single. I think “Garamond” was still our biggest song at the time. I think “Object Permanence” reflects on us really well. “Funny Face” encapsulates a lot of what we’re trying to do on the record, and it’s a quick banger–we don’t really release short songs as singles, so it’s nice to release a song that doesn’t have three choruses with different lyrics. It’s not my favorite on the record, but I’m happy it’s the first one. We were all stoked on it when we were writing it.
You guys are teasing “You Ominously End” with the banjo emoji, and that one’s out tomorrow. That’s one of the big departures from Never Before Seen, and a ton of these songs have pretty prominent banjo. How did you decide to integrate that into your sound?
We got a banjo for fun, and we used twelve-string acoustic guitar for the extra octave on every song. We used banjo on five songs, and it cuts through well. There are licks here that sound like they should be on guitar, but I can’t do another fucking twinkle song–all due respect to my peers in the scene! I just always seek out ways to make things cool. It’s easy to do a twinkle riff, but it’s big-brained to do a fucking country lick on a banjo. Our songs have always been rooted in folk elements–every song I’ve written since What’s Mine Is Yours I wrote on my acoustic guitar. Structurally, the bones of the band have always been rooted in singer-songwriter shit. There’s obviously a lot of Phoebe Bridgers in our lyrics, and she uses a lot of banjo. Even the Noah Kahan record, even if some of it’s kinda basic, is just great songwriting to me. If the songs lend themselves to western elements, fuck it, let’s just roll with it.
Then you have a song like “Early Onset,” which is the most stripped-down song you’ve ever released.
Yeah, that’s probably the most stripped-down song in our whole discography.
Is that always how you envisioned that song, or did you try different versions of it–louder, bigger, more rock?
I really, really wanted it to be acoustic, but because of my crescendo-ass brain–so many Arms Lengths songs have that end section–but the Goo Goo Dolls section at the end with the strings, I wanted that to be a breakdown with the full band and have the last chorus be full band. We’ll probably do it that way live, but we didn’t have time. I flew to LA, where our producer Anton [DeLost] is from, and recorded it in one day and met up with Bonnie Brooksbank, who did strings on the record, and helped write the parts there with her–she’s so talented so it was easy–and she added those strings and it came to life. Originally we weren’t sure if it should be on the record, even though I liked the lyrics a lot, when we heard the strings we knew it had to be on there. So many of my favorite records have those acoustic songs–”If It Means a Lot to You” on Homesick, “Goodness Pt. 1” on Goodness, although I guess it’s not on that record, but it’s one of their best songs. It’s a top five song for me out of our new stuff.
If there’s one song you’re most excited for people to hear on There’s a Whole World Out There, which is it?
I’d say either “You Ominously End,” because it might become our fucking biggest song because it’s jarring–people will be like, “Arms Length with banjo?” but it is probably our heaviest song. It’s not like Bilmuri, and I love that band, but their gimmick is that every song does something silly. The song is one of our most serious. It’s about a suicide attempt, and I think the banjo is more tasteful than corny. Maybe people won’t agree! We’ll see. It still sounds like us. It kinda sounds like “Formative Age.” A lot of our songs can blend together, and I think a lot of why we tried these new textures, like the banjo, is so we don’t write the same song over and over again. The other song I’m most excited for people to hear is “Morning Person.” That’s my favorite Arms Length song by a fucking landslide. I think it’s so cool, and everything that song is is just what I wanted this band to be. I love the lyrics–probably the best I’ve ever written, the banjo, the guitar tone. It’s probably the best guitar tone we’ve had since our first EP. I’m over the moon for that one specifically.
What was the writing process for that one like? That was one I was hoping to talk about.
All these songs came about super naturally. I knew I needed to write, so I wrote all the lyrics in the summer of 2024. Never Before Seen was around for years. The “Object Permanence” melody I think I wrote when I was literally 13. I remember that. “Morning Person” came naturally–all these songs did. I usually start with a chord progression. It kinda sounds like the “Garamond” chord progression but a little different, and I thought it lent itself well to the song, and I hummed the main melody, which sounds so much like “End of Reel.”
I didn’t want to say that, but I was thinking it too, especially with the way “Halley” flows into it like how “Fear of Good” flows into “End of Reel.”
“End of Reel” is probably my favorite off that record. Even the guitar loop is kinda similar, and they both start with the word “first.” Ours is “first things first,” his is “first breath.” The record of the song is so different that I don’t think I ripped it off. But The Hotelier know how much we love them! Their guitar player loves us too, so it’s okay. I wasn’t sure if the lyric “Do I sleep enough? / Well, I can’t get enough of the stuff” was written before or if I came up with something sick. Did I steal it off a Forever 21 shirt? I think it works so fucking well. It started to take on a life of its own as I was writing, and the lyrics came to me in a couple days. I was listening to lots of Vein, and they’re a big inspiration on lots of our breakdowns. The melody in the bridge lends itself to a 4/4 time signature when I originally sing it in 6/8, and I wanted to do a breakdown in 4/4 based around the vocal melody. That’s why the end of the song switches. “Formative Age” does that too. I guess I know a decent amount of music theory, and I felt so fucking smart when I wrote that. Jeff has some of his best fills in that song. I wrote all that on my acoustic guitar, and Jeff’s fucking incredible. We wrote that blast beat part together. His best work is by far on this record. I didn’t think about our fans one fucking time writing the record. I was just jamming in my room, hoping something would stick, and then I’d bring them to Jeff–that’s how most of our songs always have been made.
A recurring lyrical motif throughout this album that I didn’t notice on previous Arms Length stuff is astronomy. The stars, the sun, the moon, constellations–they all come up a lot throughout There’s a Whole World Out There. There’s of course the fun line in “Fatal Flaw” where you say the band name. What’s that all mean to you as a well to draw from?
That’s how the album name came about. I guess the grand scheme, the big picture, is a big theme on the album, and we come from a small town but we’ve seen so much of the world over the past couple of years, and I think that inspired a lot of it too. The songs aren’t about being on the road at all–they’re about personal shit–but I think one thing about all our songs is that they’re all life or death. None of them are fucking happy at all. They’re all about feeling big feelings, pure devotion, life or death. The world as a concept is so grandiose, and I think there’s stuff that can mean the world to you–a person can mean the world to you. The lyric that says the album name in “The World” is “when there’s a whole world out there / and you would’ve never known.” That’s about, maybe, taking a step back and seeing the big picture. That was a big thing I had to learn how to do in the past number of years. I was so mentally ill writing Never Before Seen and less mentally ill writing this one, in a much better space, but with a lot more time to reflect on that past shit. I think that’s more prominent on the record. It comes from a different place in my brain for sure–it’s more processed, but I was in the middle of it on the last record. We aren’t a political band, so I’m not reflecting on the world, but maybe I’m reflecting on what the world means. I also think talking about stars is fucking dope. Comparing the stars to love, that’s dope. It comes up in so many. “The Weight,” that song is really cool–it’s the first song I tried to write that’s a concept, sorta. It’s about the overlap–it’s about eating disorders, kinda, about wanting to be as small as possible, but also about feeling as small as possible in the world. I love that overlap. I hope it’ll hit for people. I talk about the moon, the sun, the stars, I talk about life and death, I talk about water all the fucking time–man, we’re an emo band! Everything feels immense. It’s probably not that big a deal, and I’m mostly chilling.
That’s an interesting point you bring up too, especially in light of you guys getting so big so fast. Do people ever make assumptions based on your lyrics and the content of your songs about the sorts of people you are? Is that a tough thing to navigate?
I don’t think too much about it, but people think things. That’s just how it is, I guess, when people are just listening to the songs. I think people think I’m a classic frontman–I’m particular in certain ways, and I do my hair, but people probably also think I’m a dick. No one in the band is fucking serious, though. We’re all just ridiculous. Jeff will go days without saying a word, but he’s so funny. I think we’re just naturally different than what people think. We’re all idiots! I do go through shit, and I’ve been through a lot in my life, and I like to dwell–a lot of what I write about is in the past, and I’ve been mostly chilling for the past few years. I’m lucky to be in one piece, eating food–it’s chill. Twitter’s fucking annoying, but it’s what it is.
Is there some connection between “The World,” “The Weight,” and “The Wound,” given the naming connection?
I didn’t write them to be a perfect trilogy. “The Wound” is about not particularly wanting to die anymore as much. It’s like that one fucking Frank Turner song, I realized. My mom’s a big Frank Turner fan. It’s about thinking you don’t want to die anymore, which is cool. “The World” is just an intro to the album, depicting a scene. They’re all in different keys, but I know some motherfucker on Reddit’s gonna say we die it on purpose or whatever. No, but it’s cool that you think so. I just wanted to gaslight my fans.
There’s a song on here–in “Genetic Lottery,” you have that line “the way me and my friends talk / we spend more time reminiscing / than we ever do existing“–that I think really captures that reflective tone you mentioned. What do you imagine, if you went back to Allen and the rest of the band back when you were working on What’s Mine Is Yours, and you played them the new album, what would you guys think of it?
Ben’s not an original member, but he’d probably be into it. He’d instantly like it, I think. Jeff’s always been really into EDM and shit. He was into hyperpop. He loves percussion and cool rhythmic parts, and this record does that more than ever before. He’d be into it. Jeremy and I started the band writing songs together, and he’s more involved in the writing process. What’s Mine Is Yours sounded almost exactly how we wanted it to sound, but we were still a young band–we were like 19 and Jeff was like 16–and we had a crossroads, self-funding our shit and paying thousands of dollars out of pocket to fund our EPs. We had to ask if we wanted to return to the same producer or see if we could go with a producer who’s a bit more polished. With Everything Nice, that’s mostly a pop-punk record. “Safer Skin” kinda sounds like “Sasha” by Turnover or something, and I was listening to a lot of Young States by Citizen at the time. We really leaned into that kinda thing. I think, seeing how they sounded, Jeremy wasn’t too stoked on the more polished sound, and I think that’s valid, because I hate when a band gets too polished. I thought we were walking that line of not really sounding too polished–Never Before Seen sounds more polished, to me, than Everything Nice. Little Allen would probably like it if I could hear the lyrics. The guitar tone is fucking awesome, which is a big deal to me. I don’t think Never Before Seen had a great guitar tone. We made that a priority on this record. I think Jeremy would be into it. “Genetic Lottery” was an old Arms Length song. It was like the fifth song we ever wrote, and it never got finished. I revived it and flipped it. It used to be called “Deep Down.” I think we’d all be into it–I hope so! It’s my favorite thing we’ve done.
Do you guys revisit older songs a lot? You mentioned reusing the melody from “Object Permanence,” and you rereleased “Blank Slate” as “Arms Length.”
Yes. “Gallows Humor” was supposed to be on What’s Mine Is Yours, but it wasn’t finished. It’s one of my favorites on Everything Nice now–probably my second favorite. I do that constantly. A lot of the songs on Never Before Seen I had as a teenager. The bulk of this record I had to whip up, but it sounds very similar still. It’s no huge departure. I like to dwell, right, so if I think I caught a spark in a bottle ten fucking years ago I’ll bring it back.
If you could play with anyone, ideal bill, who would it be?
I really badly wanna play with The Hotelier. It’d be weird at this point. It’d have to be a festival. There were talks of us being on that tour with Foxing, and dude I would’ve paid to play those shows. I was telling Jake from Counter Intuitive, who helped that tour come to be, that we’d pay. Chris, the guitarist from The Hotelier, really likes us and pushed for us to be on there. Understandably they wanted bands from that time, and Emperor X is a friend of Christian’s. It was another 2013 band opening the other leg.
It was Glitterer, apparently.
Oh, shit. I saw The Hotelier with Title Fight–and La Dispute. I was literally 14. If we could open for Phoebe Bridgers, that’d be a dream. I guess she’s very Urban Outfitters now, but people talk about her like she’s washed. I remember submitting Everything Nice to her label. She didn’t respond. When I was a young teenager I loved Counterparts, my favorite band–we actually played with them. There was a lot of overlap with our fans. I’d love to get Grandview back. I’d love to open that show, and I’ve talked to Jake from Counter Intuitive about that. I’d love to play with Pianos Become the Teeth or Touché Amoré–I’m just describing a festival now. My big three of all time would probably be The Hotelier, Phoebe, and maybe Grandview. Pianos Become the Teeth would also be there, up until Keep You. When I was small, the band that got me into music in general was Sum 41, and I’m biased, but I’d put them up against Green Day or Blink-182 any day. They’re the heaviest of the three too. We’ll play with anyone, and we have! We’ve played with pop-punk, hardcore, metalcore, twinkle emo bullshit–we did that Silverstein tour.
Phoebe Bridgers was on Cody. It’s not impossible.
We just aren’t as cool as Joyce Manor or Title Fight.
It’s because you guys came up after Tumblr. Otherwise every single post on there would be a live shot of you guys with the chorus of “Object Permanence” in varsity font.
I was on Tumblr! Even Phoebe buys into the Tumblr scene! It’s very true that my favorite bands have corny melodramatic lyrics. I love Mansions, too. Dig Up the Dead has been a big influence since “Garamond.” The end of “Garamond” going into that acoustic part, I got that from “Wormhole.” That’s a huge record for me.
What’s a band you think Arms Length fans would be surprised to hear you like?
Vein’s inspired so many of our breakdowns. Maybe they’re not really breakdowns. I think the heavy shit would be a surprise. It isn’t a mystery we’re into more folk-leaning artists. I ripped Phoebe lyrics on the last record. That doesn’t shock anyone, but it might shock people that I’m really into screamo. I know a lot about that shit. I’m not super into hardcore these days. I think you can hear it instrumentally, but we’re pretty polished. A song like “Tough Love” doesn’t sound like Touché Amoré. I think Vein’s a big one.
What do you want people to take away from There’s a Whole World Out There?
I think it’s a true progression of the band in all aspects. Jeff’s best parts are on their record–he’s grooving more, even in “Funny Face,” and he’s come a long way. I want people to realize it’s the same themes, lyrically, but it’s different tonally. I don’t think I’m reusing shit from Never Before Seen, but I think I’m expanding on it. I hope people agree. I used to hate singing. I never wanted to be the singer for Arms Length. I just wrote the shit, and it was so personal that I had to sing. I had to learn how to sing, and I think my vocals are super strong on this record. I blew out my voice a lot on Never Before Seen and it was super unhealthy. I’ve been able to do a lot more shit with my voice. I think Jeremy is just an amazing bassist. I helped write them, but I cannot play for shit, and Jeremy’s so fucking good. I think all of us would agree that this is the most Arms Length record so far. I think it does sound more organic, especially the guitar tone, and I hope people think we sound more like a real band.
There’s a Whole World Out There is out May 16th via Pure Noise.
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Zac Djamoos | @gr8whitebison
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