#26: there's a whole world out there
The last few days I have been listening to the new album by the Ontario emo band Arm’s Length, There’s a Whole World Out There. It has been a long time since I’ve loved a record quite like this — a big pop-punk album that is dead serious, that’s all in, that sounds like it shouts out against a world that is on fire, the flames licking the distant landscape and the tiny hairs on your skin all at once. It’s a record very much in the model of The Greatest Generation and Home, Like NoPlace Is There, and it sounds a little bit like both of those but not really (though I was not surprised to find that The Hotelier was a big topic in my friend Zac Djamoos’s excellent interview with the band — Keep You is another reference point I should have thought of myself).
What’s most similar between There’s a Whole World Out There and those records is the prerequisite: that you’re ready to be exposed to that full heart, those big big feelings that threaten to overwhelm everything. If you’re not into that or not ready for it this album, like Generation or Home, will feel suffocating, maybe even cloying. But if you’re on that level, you’ll find a record with huge, sledgehammer hooks that feel so good coming out of your mouth. You’ll find dynamic, crisp pop-punk songs that will rile you up, get you moving, raise your hands up.
What I love, what I can’t help but love, is a record that feels like it gives you something to believe in. There’s a lot of pain here — genetic diseases, dying loved ones, a world slowly ending — but there’s something defiant in the way these songs find so much to live for anyway. “The World” turns these reasons into cathartic, throat-cracking shouts among banging, busting guitars. Later, “The Wound” contemplates a new generation and the morality of letting them witness gestures broadly all of this (“lucky to live to see the world burn up”). The big-swing closer “Morning Person” — which struggles with all the largest questions, the ones impossible to resolve in any comfortable way, that make it difficult to sleep at night — finds sure footing in the details: “first things first / you’ll wake to the morning birds.” Nothing feels stable in this world, but every once in a while, something concrete and sensory reaches us, surprises us. The feel of a pulse, the smell of a mown lawn.
Every song on There’s a Whole World Out There is achingly, heart-rendingly wrought. This is such a sad record, in so many ways, but it is also, in spite of itself, in awe of how beautiful it is to be alive at all, like it cannot help itself. “Halley” is the one there, an anthem for a hopelessly complex kind of love, so painful, so haunted, but unavoidable. As a song, it is totally intoxicating, tightly wound and precise like a blown-out pop song drenched in a kind of fury. It’s when Arm’s Length allows the sweetness in, the tender, patient way Allen Steinberg delivers that line: “all the mean bones in your body / are dissolving.” It is a painful relationship (a familial one, it appears) approached, still, with care, with intimate knowing. It’s a punk song that does not barrel forward toward the point. It lingers. It stays with you. It’s my favorite song I’ve heard so far this year.
Last week, I tried to write a newsletter about how everything feels so far away right now — not in a depression/dissociation way, but in a catastrophe/billionaire/AI-type way. I tried to get at the heart of this feeling, to resolve it somehow, but I could not do so in any meaningful way, so I dumped the essay (Jia Tolentino articulates the feeling better than I could here).
But I know that what helps with this distant, numb feeling is finding something with heart to latch onto (I have the phrase “HEART IS HARD TO FIND” tattooed on my arm for a reason). I can’t figure out what to do with this feeling, but I can tell you that this record has heart in spades. It has so much, and it really does help to hear this band give it all here. Listening to There’s a Whole World Out There feels like inching closer to life, to the world, like feeling the stray wisps singe your skin for the first time in forever. It hurts, but it’s alive. Arm’s Length has heart, and I believe in them.
Stray thoughts:
While I was drafting this essay in my notebook yesterday, I noticed something white and orange falling from the sky, shimmering. I thought something was literally on the fire. I was working the front desk at the museum where I work, so I stepped out the front door and looked up. What I thought was burning ash turned out to be the evening spring sun sparkling against the heavy pollen falling from the trees. It was beautiful. Nice!
I made a list of things I want to do this summer. Here’s a sample:
Spend more time with my friends
Call home every week
More hikes with Jonny and the dogs
Write about music again
Layout the first novel all nice and distribute digitally for free
Keep writing the new novel. Share pages early and often
[a number of points for grad school stuff]
Read books I want to read
Get back on my bike once I get my wheel back [my wheel got stolen]
Make more lists
Listen to more music
Nice!
I’m reading Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata. It’s very weird! Uncomfortable. Uncanny. I’m loving it.
I’m gonna go listen to the new Laura Stevenson song for the first time. Listen with me:
My name is Jordy Walsh, and I’m a writer based in Philadelphia. I Keep a Diary is a newsletter about music, books, and writing.