Philadelphia folk-rock quartet Sadurn have shared the second single from their forthcoming debut album Radiator, coming May 6 on Run For Cover Records. “Golden Arm” follows last month’s “Snake,” one of our favorite songs of February.
Where “Snake” was anthemic and upbeat, “Golden Arm” is more serene, centering bandleader Genevieve DeGroot’s intimate vocals and guitar. They yearn for a connection that seems just out of reach, singing over sparing strums and percussion, “I wish I understood a hundred times / The gnawing in my heart / I wanna touch you on your golden arm.” Slide guitar streaks across the song like dusk’s last rays of sunlight, and at times, DeGroot vocalizes wordlessly, as if at a loss to wrap their arms around a feeling so big.
“I wrote this song at the same time as ‘snake,’ while doing a work exchange on a homestead in North Carolina. It kind of all came out at once, which feels like this lucky occasion when you’re writing songs. I didn’t think much of it in its initial form, it felt like more of a poem than a story,“ DeGroot recalls in a statement. “But playing it with the band for the first time, and then later adding the synth and the slide guitar and coming up with the harmonies when we made the recordings, all those layers really brought it into a different special realm.”
“The video came about very serendipitously when Amelia and I were on a road trip back in the fall with another friend,” they add. “We found this amazing camping spot and decided to shoot a video on Amelia’s camcorder—the landscape there really felt like it fit with the song.”
Sadurn started as DeGroot’s solo project, expanding to a full band in early 2020. Their plans for that year didn’t pan out (2020 was nothing if not a year of canceled plans), but they were eventually able to hunker down in a secluded cabin in the Poconos to record the songs that would become Radiator.
Watch the “Golden Arm” video below. You can preorder Radiator right here.