Unlocking Armlock

Live photos by Josh Sabini.

The resumes of Melbourne-based duo Armlock’s Simon Lam and Hamish Mitchell are too long for me to bother to write here. 

As cliché as that is to say, it’s true. From Simon having producer credits on a Charli XCX song to Hamish producing some of our favourite Australian releases of the last few years. And, of course, both having already achieved musical success with their previous electronic and dance projects, I’lls and Couture. After the end of both projects and Hamish stepping away from music for a few years, they brought guitars into the studio for the first time to experiment.

Now, five years later, with two albums released and a third on the way, Armlock’s beautifully made ethereal indie is here to stay. I sat down with the pair at the cafe that sits right in the middle of their respective houses, the night after their annual hometown show, to talk about everything Armlock. 

Every time I talk to someone about you guys, they say you’re always in the studio.

Hamish Mitchell: Interesting… Well, it’s not working on Armlock stuff. We’re usually only doing that once a week. At the moment, we aren’t at all because we have a record in the can.

How long did the new record take to finish?

Simon Lam: Ages.

Were you still working on Seashell Angel Lucky Charm when you started on it?

Simon: There are a few songs on it that didn’t make it onto Seashell. We’ve always been ahead of our releases in terms of our material. This was the first time we had to make a record and were behind. We did a few weeks working on it that were intensive, doing four days in a row to finish the last thirty percent. But usually, we will just spend a Friday on Armlock.

That’s quite nice.

Hamish: It’s great to do it just once a week. 

Is it just the two of you in the studio?

Simon: Yeah. We have a computer program for the drums. 

Does it feel quite different when you play live with a band?

Simon: We just lean into whatever sound happens naturally. The drum program we use only sounds good if you use it quietly, so that makes everything else quiet. But then, when we play live, it’s so much more fun to smack it, so we lean into that direction.

Yeah, that’s something I noticed yesterday. The drums drive the band when you play live. 

Simon: We love that. There is a pretty big difference between the recording and the live. It wasn’t really planned, but we just do what feels good for each scenario.

Is this record going to still be around twenty minutes like the last two?

Simon: It’s just thirty.

Did it feel like a push to hit thirty?

Hamish: It was really hard. The way the songs are, they have no fat, so getting an album over twenty minutes is really tough. There’s so much work that goes into finishing one of those songs. Everything is so purposeful that it’s hard to do ten songs. It sounds ridiculous. But it’s so detail-oriented, and there’s nowhere to hide. 

Even listening to your songs, it feels so meticulous; everything seems to be there for a reason.

Simon: Totally, and we also don’t do guitar solos. That’s an easy way to gain twenty extra seconds. It’s either singing or the song stops, and there’s only so much you can sing. 

Hamish: We might do the next album differently, more of a studio thing in a concentrated time, because it feels like there needs to be some kind of novelty injected into the process.

What are you thinking?

Simon: It would be cool to do it with a band just to hash it out in the room, get it feeling good and then record it. The one we just made is about as far as we can take our current concept of super dialed in, meticulous but minimal, not hi-fi but not lo-fi.

Is that how you felt with your last projects [Couture, I’lls]? Where you got to a certain point and felt like you couldn’t take it any further? 

Hamish: A lot of that is environmental, like people get busy, someone leaves town. These things come to an end when they’re meant to. The same thing might happen to this project one day, who knows? Life indicates when they’re over. And if you can’t do it the way you want to do it, it’s probably time to not do it anymore. There’s no point pushing something that’s not fun anymore.

Totally.

Simon: All our projects have been made off being a bit silly. I’lls was us being like, what if we tried to play as a band, but I’m finger drumming, and there’s a synthesiser. That was a silly concept. Then, Couture was us being like, what if we made dance music because we don’t really do that. Then Armlock was what if we made guitar music, we don’t do that. Now it’s gotten to a point where it doesn’t feel silly enough.

Does it feel serious?

Hamish: A little bit. It doesn’t feel novel anymore, which makes it harder. Simon’s right, it has to feel silly. It has to feel like, I guess, this is what you do if you’re the kind of person who does this. You have to embrace it. It’s good for the creative spirit to live on that edge. It’s like when you first get Ableton, you start making stuff and don’t know what you are doing, but you make some of the most creative, interesting stuff you’ve ever made because you don’t know. Trying to capture that in any project is paramount to having fun and also to making good art.

For sure. It looks like you guys are having fun when you’re playing on stage

Simon: Last night was really fun, in particular.

Hamish: Yeah, it was, but just finishing the last record was really tough. We want to try to change that part up.

When is it out?

Hamish: Some point this year. We finished it in November.

“Strobe” is cool.

Simon: Thank you. Something like that is us loosely trying to do a rap song. All the vocal flow is like rap flow. Little things like that, just trying to make it a little bit goofy makes it so engaging for us.

Hamish: It is a goofy song, even the film clip was goofy, and the way it resolves is kind of goofy [laughs].

You guys are clearly so intricate about your instrumentals. Is that how you feel about your lyrics?

Simon: With this next record, I’ve tried to take a slightly different approach with it. The lyrics are really dumb. I’m trying to boil it down, making them conversational and unpoetic.

Hamish: I think your exact term was “Normal Style”.

Simon: It’s jarring sometimes hearing something so unfinessed as a lyric. I was really interested in that.

Are you happy with how they came out?

Simon: Generally, yeah.

In past interviews, you were so open and honest about not really knowing how to play your instruments. Do you feel like you’re getting better at it?

Hamish: Unfortunately, we’re getting better, but we’re still terrible. I was working on a record earlier this week, and this really good guitar player came in; he was doing all this stuff that made so much sense. I asked him to do something, and he could just do it. It was a big damn I suck moment.

Simon: I got my guitar serviced recently; the guy gave me my guitar and was like see how I fixed it up. It’s like I can’t tell, I can’t even play a riff for you right now.

Hamish: It’s so funny when I walk into a guitar shop, and I go to give a guitar a go, and I’m like, I guess I better play Armlock songs because I don’t know how to play anything else.

Coming from groups that had success in other worlds, what was the response when you started Armlock? 

Simon: A lot of the people I knew in the music industry at the time were in the electronic world. I remember putting out our first track andknowing all these people were going to be very confused. I was singing when traditionally I’m such a behind-the-scenes person. I’m still surprised that people react so positively to it. When we’re making it, it feels insane. It seems hilarious, at least it is to me, knowing Hamish and me for so long. 

Hamish: People said stuff to me being like ‘What the fuck is going on?’

Simon: The first music video we did, we were all looking angry.

Hamish: I was like this makes complete sense to me which is probably part of the problem, really. They’re just songs; it doesn’t really matter. There were definitely people who were like ‘What the fuck is going on? Is Simon having a meltdown?’

Does it feel like it’s the natural progression where it’s like, ‘Of course, we’re doing this now’?

Simon: We did it at a time when we felt particularly disconnected from everyone. We did make it in an insular way; we didn’t really talk to anyone about it.

Hamish: We are pretty insular about anything, but that was particularly it.

Making moves in silence.

Hamish: I have a friend who says, ‘Loose lips sink creative ships.’ I think it’s kind of true.

Yeah, I do too. Talking about it can psych yourself out of it sometimes.

Hamish: Yeah, and also there’s a point where you can show someone something too early, and it completely cuts it or derails it. 

Does Armlock feel like the project that makes the most sense as a form of expression, fun and silliness? As if it were the project that everything was all leading up to.

Hamish: For me, it makes sense, just because I’ve been tinkering with guitar production for a while. It makes sense because it doesn’t make sense. It’s kind of random, and I don’t know what I’m doing, so of course that’s what I’m doing, because that’s what my entire career is based on. 

Simon: I do sometimes think one of the electronic projects could have been it, but we didn’t really do it right. I think this is the project where we finally got our shit together in terms of the record, a manager, visuals, and actually putting some effort into it.

Hamish: It is random, but maybe that’s what makes it different.

Simon: I still find it funny when we’re driving around America pulling up to venues, and I have a pedal board. I think it’s so funny. It’s one with the cheapest pedals; I’m not investing in good ones.

There’s something nice about not being technically aware.

Simon: Yeah, when it comes to synths, I like the best synths. But when it comes to pedals, I’m like, I don’t care, they’re all the same to me.

There’s probably something about how genuine your mentality is that makes it work.

Hamish: The ideal would be to bring nothing and just use whatever the support band has got.

Simon: As long as the guitars are in D. 

Hamish: And I can tune down or up.

Simon: There has been a moment recently where it’s like, we are like Armlock.

It’s been six years, you’d hope so.  

Hamish: On this last record, it was like we were doing stuff, and it was like this is what we would do. It’s weird when you get three records into a project, you start doing the thing that you would always do because you’ve got this lexicon or vocab. We would’ve quit by now and done something else. Now we are in it.

Simon: It’s definitely the longest we've done something.

Now you guys are armlocked in.

Simon: Never say never, wait for our orchestral project, or maybe we’ll do a Jazz trio next.

Hamish: We have to have a proper swing on our next record.  

Taking it back to the uni days. Actually, I can’t believe we’ve gone this far without asking. What were your first impressions of each other?

Hamish: I was like this guy looks cool. He had a red cardigan on and a shirt that said “God is one of us,” he had a huge fringe, really scuffed up Dr Martins and drainpipe jeans like he was in the Horrors.

Simon: That would go pretty hard right now.

Hamish: He’s the one who gave me Ableton. He showed me his solo music. I showed him Boards of Canada. If we hadn’t met each other, I don’t know what I would be doing. We had this like-mindedness. We both felt like the jazz thing was awesome, but it was a bit weird and alienating. That was my initial impression. This guy had a fire fit.

Simon: Well, you were wearing a purple corduroy jacket, and we were sitting in the auditorium. Everyone was sitting, but Hamish was standing. I saw you from a few rows away and was like, this is a loud man. Then he showed me Boards of Canada, which I was like this shit is cool.

Hamish: [Laughs].