Arm’s Length

There’s a song on There’s A Whole World Out There, the second album by Canadian four-piece Arm’s Length, called “Palinopsia”. Derived from the Greek for “again” (palin) and “seeing” (opsia), it’s a visual phenomenon marked by the persistence of an image after the original stimulus has been removed. In other words, the presence of something that’s no longer actually there. It’s a song that singer and lyricist Allen Steinberg specifically wrote about “pure devotion or love towards someone that may no longer be a part of your life”, but it’s also something that applies to the record as a whole. Because throughout the course of the album’s 12 songs, Steinberg wrestles a good deal with the part of life that’s been and gone. At the same time, there is, he says, a noticeable difference between the person who wrote this record compared to the one who wrote Arm’s Length’s 2022 debut, Never Before Seen, Never Again Found.

“I had the songs for the last record,” he 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.”

Produced by Anton DeLost—who worked with the band on Never Before Seen, Never Again Found and 2021’s EP, Everything Nice—There’s A Whole World Out There does indeed expand Arm’s Length’s horizons in accordance with Steinberg’s developing frontal lobe, presenting him as more self-reflective contemplative than he was before. He wrote the parts for all the instruments, as well as the vast majority of the lyrics, alone in his room, and then brought those initial sketches, recorded as voice memos, to drummer Jeff Whyte, who added percussion to Steinberg’s song skeletons. While the majority of the creative process was in Steinberg’s hands, it was only when these songs were recorded as a full band with Jeremy Whyte, who played bass on the record, and Ben Greenblatt, that their full potential was realized. The result is that the feelings driving these songs burst and bloom with full force, building on the incredible foundations set by the band’s previous recorded output.

Of course, since those releases, Arm’s Length’s profile has grown significantly. What had once been a more personal outlet for catharsis now has a dedicated following. Mostly written in the summer of 2024, the songs on this record largely reflect on the three year period before that, from when the band were tracking the previous album. That was when the frontman says he was the “most mentally ill” he’d ever been in his life, the result of various personal issues and anxieties. There were times during the writing process of this record where, in confronting that period, Steinberg worried that he was being too personal.

“The band’s been doing better than any of us could have imagined,” he says, “and we have a following now. So I had to put myself in the headspace of ‘I’m not doing any of this for anyone else at all.’ I didn’t think about our fanbase at all when writing the songs. We’ve always been super honest lyrically, so we put that into overdrive on this record.”

Indeed, Arm’s Length pull no punches here. From the moment “The World” starts proceedings, There’s A Whole World Out There unfolds with the dual torment and exhilaration of what it means to be alive—but with the knowledge and understanding that everything is also always lost. “Fatal Flaw” doubles down on the wistful longing that drives this record while also addressing what it means to be an artist who uses pain to create art, while the moving “Genetic Lottery” is a self-aware dig at that nostalgia that Steinberg has felt since he was young. Elsewhere, “The Wound” and “You Ominously End” —both of which feature some banjo playing—sees the singer counteract his confessionals with some deliciously black humor. The latter song—about someone who attempts to take their own life—also demonstrates Steinberg’s ability to write truth through fiction. For while the emotions in the song are raw, visceral and real, its narrative is complete invention.

“It’s more about the fear of a friend doing something like that,” says Steinberg, “because you never know what they’re going through. People naturally lose touch with their friends. You still have this undying devotion or love for them, but you don’t always know how to reach out to them anymore because it’s been a super long time.”

While that song, like most on the album, is designed to be played loud, there are also moments of delicate, tender nuance throughout. These songs sway and swell in correlation to the emotion contained within them, building up to devastating crescendos. Even the quiet, acoustic contemplation of “Early Onset” finds a way to do that.

The biggest and most devastating crescendo, however, is the epic finale of “Morning Person”. Steinberg describes the song as “super dramatic” and “so emo”, and he’s not wrong—across six-and-a-half-minutes it revisits and reasserts the main themes of the record. It isn’t just heart on sleeve, but open-veined, a razor slicing all the way down this album’s arms to devastating effect. And yet, despite the raw vulnerability permeating that song, and the album as a whole, it’s also full of the same kind of resilience that Steinberg possessed in order to get through those trying few years—and, as a result, now being able to look back on them, if not with a smile, then at least with a palpable sense of relief.

“It’s all about having some hindsight,” he says, “and being able to look back on the traumas that I talked about on the last record and which were present in my own life. I think that they’re still ever present on this album, but there’s a different mood and a shift in how I’m talking about the trauma. And “Morning Person” just wraps all that up, and everything I’m trying to say on this record. It’s accepting the damage is done, and then moving on.”

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