What do you do when you can’t run away from the past? I’ve referred in conversation to 2022’s breakout film Everything Everywhere All At Once as an incredible display of this idea. The film imagines the disagreeable actions of our past (I’m using “our” to refer to collective humanity, by the way) as a multiverse where every decision, good or bad, splinters off into another world for our protagonist to navigate while carrying the burden of those decisions. The sins of our forebearers and the pain that they might cause haunt our every move, creating a devastating push-pull on our own health and mental states. Nathaniel Banks, lead singer of Arlie, is acutely aware of the physical impact of this trauma — following Arlie’s remarkable ascent into indie stardom in 2018 behind the wait EP and tours with COIN and Mt. Joy, he felt a shift that would drastically impact the creation of their debut album BREAK THE CURSE, which is out now via Atlantic Records. “I felt myself actively slipping away after those tours, and I reached a point where I had to actively put my brain back together again.” We’re talking in October of 2021, as Arlie has just returned from a date at Austin City Limits for their first shows back in nearly three years, following the obvious elephant of COVID and Banks’s self-imposed hiatus following this period of mental insecurity.
“Something about this song itches my brain” “I can’t help but just vibe hard to it and the chorus fills me with glee making me feel young.” “I would’ve bet on my life this song came out like 7 years ago I remember this melody but now that I found this I’m crying because it reminds me of a time that I’m not living anymore” “This band is definitely going to blow up soon and fast!”
Those YouTube comments above from various songs off of wait are only a smattering of the positivity that surrounded Arlie when they burst onto the scene. I remember the first time I heard them — I was covering Birmingham, Alabama’s now-defunct Sloss Fest and I looked across the festival field in the middle of the day to see Banks and co. wearing Starbucks aprons onstage while playing songs that sounded and felt as if The Beatles were transported into 2018. It was a mesmerizing feeling that few new bands can create on the festival stage; at once, they felt both fully formed in that their songs were perfectly crafted with pop hooks that would rattle around in your head for weeks afterward, but they stretched out their music in a live setting in a way that suggested we were only scratching the surface for what Arlie had to offer. When I talked to Banks about the creation of BREAK THE CURSE in October, I had already received a copy of the record and learned that its release date had moved several times. I was floored at what this band could do, and told him as much — he laughed and shared that “COVID was a blessing in disguise because the original deadline for the album came and went and we just didn’t have a finished product that we were all super happy with.” The original sessions for BREAK THE CURSE were fractious and somewhat tense, with band members split across coasts and pressures to bring in outside collaboration to work with Banks to create the album — bassist Ryan Savage detailed that “we reached a point where we all sat down together and decided that the whole band needed to make this record. There was this momentum that we carried into it — we knew we’d have to push back on the forces that be to make this happen and to get everyone on the same page as to what we wanted, and then suddenly all the walls that we were determined to break through just vanished because of COVID.”
As it turns out, COVID was a blessing. Those pressures that were on Arlie dissipated (alongside the rest of the music industry), and they ended up having a lot more time on their hands to finish the album collaboratively in their home base of Nashville, TN. “It ended up as just the three of us,” said Banks “myself, Ryan, and Adam [Lochemes, Arlie’s drummer] over at Adam’s studio working around the clock to just do what we wanted with the album. It felt like we had all of the time in the world to do whatever we wanted to do.” This adventurous nature is apparent on BREAK THE CURSE — in the words of Tim Robinson, their debut is a cosmic gumbo of sound, with disparate genres sitting next to each other on each song while still being held together with the common theme that inspires the album’s title. Lead single “karma” is a jolt of pop-punk previously unheard in their catalog as Banks sings of a high school relationship gone wrong. “landline” is the radio hit, bringing high-definition indie-funk alongside the greatest opening line of a record in 2022: “You’ve been talking trash / saying I’m on crack”. (Seriously, I’ve walked around singing that line for a year now.) The title track is a sonic oasis, with autotuned vocals akin to Bon Iver swelling alongside electronic soundscapes that build the song to a raging stadium anthem. “crashing down” and “wait a minute” bring my Beatles comparison to clear view, with a kaleidoscopic 60s aura that makes listeners nostalgic for a time they haven’t lived through yet. It all leads to “titanic” — the momentous closer that has been floating around online since wait was released. A friend of mine texted me the morning of the album’s release celebrating that they “wouldn’t have to use SoundCloud anymore” to listen to it — it begins with a similar bounce to the Arlie of yesteryear, but eventually reaches a raging crescendo with Banks howling “‘cos we’re still young” amidst an explosion of instrumentation that makes you feel as if you’re actually sinking on the titular boat with the band. It’s a stunning achievement of a song, bringing the album to a close with a clattering ending coda that’s one of my favorite moments in music this year.
“There were definitely larger goals for the sounds on this record than what we made on wait,” according to Banks. “We really wanted to walk the middle between the lo-fi music that we love with the nostalgia created by the ‘golden age of music’, and then high-definition clarity that you’ll hear in music today. Any time we can blur the line and keep that magic that we love about older music, we’re going to make that choice.” I asked Banks about where this fits in with wait, and it was clear that expansion was the only real option for the band — “wait was just a starting point for us. It implied a few different sonic directions, and then we went outward with all of it.” “Every song had a different starting point, and each of them had slightly different voices to them,” added Savage. “We were in the production process and feeling like ‘Okay, this song’s a rock song, and this song’s a dance song, and this one has some rockabilly to it.’ and just trying to let the songs speak for themselves the best that they could. I feel like Nathaniel’s voice and style of vocal production is what ties everything together as ‘the Arlie sound’, and all of us are here to add in what we think is the Arlie sound alongside it.”
When talking about the theme of the album, Banks was pensive and thoughtful about Arlie’s brief hiatus, in which he found himself looking inward and evaluating his mental state. “I had to stop making music for a second when I was in complete psychological crisis — I was hospitalized for a bit, and in this intensive therapy program that helped me evaluate myself and, importantly, my relationships with others. I think the rest of the band found themselves in a similar spot of reflection too; it’s such a hard world, you know? And we just consistently hurt ourselves and hurt each other and continue to repeat ourselves. This album, to me, is about saying ‘no’ to that cyclical pattern of abuse and hurt and trying really hard to create something new and better.” That theme of repairing both existing generational hurt and taking care of yourself is all over BREAK THE CURSE — “wait a minute” finds Banks at his own funeral, asking an age-old question: When I fake my own death I’m gonna go / To thе wake in disguise / Does anybody lovе me? / Would anybody cry?”. “crashing down” takes a thoughtful look forward with Banks sweetly proclaiming that if they only had a few years left on the planet, he’d “sell all my possessions / Toss my plans up /Dropping everything to go be with you”. “sickk” hones in on Banks’s crisis in stunning detail, and perhaps creates the thesis statement for the album in whole:
Gonna reset my computer
I’m gonna restart everything
I’m gonna go back where I started from
To the default setting
So then, what is “the Arlie sound” for a band so proficient in subverting traditional songwriting and soundscapes? After spending a minute or two thinking about it, Banks gave me this: “If I could put it into words, those original sessions with all of these established, incredibly talented outside producers wouldn’t have been such a struggle because I could’ve said ‘It needs to sound like this.’ We wouldn’t have had to dig in with the band because we could just say what we wanted and go there. Instead, we just sort of chiseled away at this idea, at these songs, for ten or eleven months until it just felt like us. Maybe it’s “intentional” — everything we do is thought out, or thought out exploration. We’ve landed on a few catchphrases for the press releases, which are like, “bedroom pop with stadium ambitions” or something. I would never say that about us, though — sure, we’re a rock band because we play guitars and bass and drums, and a lot of this was made in our bedroom, but I think we’re more like a scatterplot of sorts. The graph is Arlie‘s sound, and each song is just a point on the plot that gives us an idea of who we are and where we’re going.”
It was a thoughtful, mathematical answer from Banks, and the next time I would see him would be at Arlie’s celebratory return show in Birmingham last December. Assembled hastily in an upstairs event space at a local brewery, the band (in a slightly different configuration due to COVID concerns) tore through a set with 250 people dancing along with them. Soon after, I’d see them play an even bigger room across the street, and they looked and sounded like total rock stars. That mesmerizing feeling that I once felt in a festival field years ago was ever-present again, and with the release of BREAK THE CURSE, I think I’ve narrowed down the best way to sum up the Arlie sound, and it’s not a sound — it’s a feeling. Arlie feels like you’re finding your new favorite band over and over again.
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BREAK THE CURSE is out now via Atlantic Records.
Arlie 2022 Tour Dates
JUNE 17, 2022 – DURHAM, NC – MOTORCO MUSIC HALL
JUNE 19, 2022 – RICHMOND, VA – RICHMOND MUSIC HALL
JUNE 21, 2022 – WASHINGTON, DC – DC9
JUNE 22, 2022 – CAMBRIDGE, MA – SONIA
JUNE 24, 2022 – NEW YORK, NY – MERCURY LOUNGE
JUNE 25, 2022 – PHILADELPHIA, PA – MILKBOY
JUNE 26, 2022 – PITTSBURGH, PA – THUNDERBIRD MUSIC HALL
JUNE 28, 2022 – COLUMBUS, OH – RUMBA CAFÉ
JUNE 30, 2022 – FERNDALE, MI – THE LOVING TOUCH
JULY 3, 2022 – DES MOINES, IA – XBK
JULY 5, 2022 – OMAHA, NE – SLOWDOWN
JULY 6, 2022 – KANSAS CITY, MO – ENCORE AT THE UPTOWN THEATER
JULY 7, 2022 – DENVER, CO – GLOBE HALL
JULY 9, 2022 – SALT LAKE CITY, UT – SOUNDWELL
JULY 10, 2022 – BOISE, ID – THE SHREDDER
JULY 12, 2022 – SEATTLE, WA – MADAME LOU’S
JULY 13, 2022 – PORTLAND, OR – MISSION THEATER
JULY 14, 2022 – SACRAMENTO, CA – GOLDFIELD TRADING POST|
JULY 16, 2022 – SANTA ANA, CA – THE CONSTELLATION ROOM
JULY 17, 2022 – SAN DIEGO, CA – VOODOO ROOM AT HOUSE OF BLUES
JULY 19, 2022 – TUCSON, AZ – CLUB CONGRESS
JULY 20, 2022 – SANTA FE, NM – MEOW WOLF
JULY 22, 2022 – AUSTIN, TX – MOHAWK
JULY 23, 2022 – HOUSTON, TX – WAREHOUSE LIVE
JULY 26, 2022 – NEW ORLEANS, LA – GASA GASA
JULY 27, 2022 – ATLANTA, GA – ROOFTOP AT THE EASTERN
JULY 28, 2022 – MEMPHIS, TN – GROWLERS
AUGUST 5, 2022 – NASHVILLE, TN – EASTSIDE BOWL
