Best of What's Next: Arms

Photos by Elizabeth Weinberg

Hometown: Brooklyn
Album: Kids Aflame
Band Members: Todd Goldstein (guitar, vocals), Tlacael Esparaza (drums), Mattie Fasano (bass)
For Fans Of: My Bloody Valentine, Dr. Dog, Harlem Shakes

Todd Goldstein first fell in love with music as a teenager, but he didn’t become a songwriter until moving to New York City a few years ago. “All my friends were moving there,” he says. “I didn’t really know what I was going to do except play music.” He’d just graduated from Brown University in Providence, R.I., and the new, crowded city seemed like an infinite abyss, the foundation for a quarter-life crisis. But when he discovered Neil Young, My Bloody Valentine and Red House Painters, Goldstein found comfort—and purpose. “I never had music that I easily clutched in the nighttime,” he recalls. “And so I was like, ’That’s what I want to do. I want to do stuff that makes people feel the way this makes me feel.’”

Making his debut LP Kids Aflame, which Goldstein released under the Arms moniker in October, was hardly a quick process. In the three years spent writing the songs, he dedicated much of his time to the band Harlem Shakes, which released an EP and one maddeningly promising album before breaking up in September. Goldstein finished Kids Aflame’s final track, “Fall,” while on the road with Harlem Shakes, his hands on the steering wheel and his mind stuck on creating one cohesive thought from two random phrases: “hands placed over our eyes” and “falling off a six-foot ledge.”

Lyrically, Kids Aflame is one big battle of metaphysical demons. “Eyeball” is Goldstein’s attempt to recreate a common feeling he experiences in his otherwise boring dreams, what he calls “that weird, foreboding lack of morality.” He thinks of fire a lot in his waking hours, he says—and perhaps because he’s not sure exactly why that is, fire emerges as the album’s main character, shining brightly on the title track, a “romantic horror movie” of a ukulele lullaby, an abstract fable about boys and girls and feeling alone.

“Everything was feeling mediated and overdetermined, and finding something simple and real was something I felt was out of my hands at the time,” he says of those early days in New York. “And so a lot of these songs actually were me feeling overwhelmed and telling myself it was going to be okay, giving myself advice that I kinda knew intellectually but I couldn’t quite feel yet.”

After smoldering as a side-project for a few years, Arms is now Goldstein’s main musical priority. It happened somewhat at the cost of his old band, but he’s fine with the new arrangement. “Harlem Shakes broke up, even in the midst of all the good stuff that was happening, because it just didn’t make sense to continue. Everyone wanted different things—which, in some cases, involved giving music up altogether—and the center just couldn’t hold. How do you continue playing in a band when no one wants to tour anymore? It just doesn’t work, and it felt like a waste of everyone’s time to continue. We’re all still great friends and are collaborating and playing on each others’ new records and everything—we’re just not a band as the five of us any more,” he says. “It wasn’t an easy decision for any of us to make, but it was, without question, for the best.”