Arms & Hearts - The Future Is Not Bright (2024) Hi-Res

Remember when music had something to say? I mean something important, something beyond boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy tries to understand what the hell went wrong (to butcher the lyric of a really good song by The Pursuit of Happiness.) Well, Arms & Hearts certainly do. But then, that was always what was so great about them; they understood that to find yourself on stage and playing to even a handful of people puts you in a privileged position, so why squander the opportunity by having nothing worthwhile to say?

And so, The Future is Not Bright, which is not as pessimistic an album as the title might suggest, offers us the (now) duo’s thoughts on everything from issues of identity, death, and love, injustice and struggles with mental health and even muses on the urge to murder your boss. Come on, we’ve all been there. (I know I have, and I’m self-employed!)

But if they pull the same optimistic silver linings out of the dark subject matter in that splendid way that they always have, sonically, they have evolved. I remember The Distance Between being in the ilk of, say Frank Turner’s punk-folk, acoustica, and certainly live, that was the vibe, which is why I would occasionally catch them in the company of the likes of B-Sydes or Jake Martin. (He once drank all my brandy!) But this time out, things are different.

Whether it is a case of the additional potential that the studio environment provides or a purposeful step into a bigger sonic arena, The Future is Not Bright is a brilliant move; the same lyrical grit but now served with musical grace and grandeur, the same musical melody but here with an equal amount of muscle. It’s big AND its clever!

Take “Bottom Line,” the sound of swaggering rock and roll, corralled into a more considered and creative form, or “Ghost’s” brooding, relentless bassline meets big anthemic indie, sounding like the bastard son of The Gaslight Anthem and The Power of Dreams. (Remember them? No? Your loss mate!)

And by the time we get to “Sink, England, Sink,” we get a glimpse of what punk could have sounded like if it had grown up, calmed down, and stopped looking at itself in the mirror and bitching about things that didn’t matter. And, controversially, perhaps learned to play the flippin’ instruments.

I’ve always liked what Arms & Hearts do, either stripped back or in full punk posse mode or the more poised and polished experience their debut album proved to be. But this, this is something else…this is the Arms & Hearts that I didn’t know I’d been waiting for all these years.

I love it. You will, too…I’ll put money on the fact.