Music
Armlock: “A lot of the lyrics are trying to search for spirituality”
Simon Lam and Hamish Mitchell of Armlock discuss the making of their emo-tinged indie rock ahead of The Great Escape 2025
Melbourne duo Armlock popped onto our radar in 2024 and never left. The raw moodiness on Seashell Angel Lucky Charm was hypnotic, grounded by a minimal, lo-fi backline that glowed from an occasional break in the clouds from something otherworldly.
Riding on the momentum of the album’s success, earlier this year the band re-released their actual debut Trust, and with more material on the way that builds on their emo-tinged sound with a pinch of hope, there’s a whole lot of Armlock to embrace.
Ahead of their performance at the Ticketmaster New Music Showcase at The Great Escape festival, we got to know Simon Lam and Hamish Mitchell a little better.
You’ve known each other for years and have collaborated before, tell us how things fell together for Armlock?
Hamish: Simon briefly had moved into my place in 2019, and we hadn’t really been working on songs for a long time. Simon and I both had [already] been working on a bunch of club stuff and Simon’s other project, Kllo, but then it was kind of nice just to pick up an instrument that we really can’t play and try and figure it out. We were just focusing on writing songs. So that’s kind of how it kind of came back together, and that’s how we kind of first started making songs.
There is some electronic flair in the production, though obviously the sound is rooted in a minimal guitar and drums set up. Was that something you knew you would take into this project?
Simon: I think that’s just how we’re used to making songs – neither of us are real guitar shredders or virtuosos. I think when a song needs something interesting, we’re much more comfortable cooking up a sound from non-traditional techniques than we are laying down a guitar solo. We’ve experimented a lot with feeding in sounds into a song from a completely different space; essentially sampling. That’s just how we make music.
Those sounds, such as that shiny 80s piano on ‘Godsend’, perhaps seem to reflect the occasional reference to the angelic or the occult…
Simon: A lot of the lyrics and the content come from quite a religious upbringing, then entering the music scene, becoming a young adult and pushing away those kind of teachings, and rejecting what your parents have taught you. Becoming a full adult now having that time to reflect in in COVID and lockdown and stuff, there’s not a return to religion, but you’ve kind of explored the material world as much as you can and then you start to realise there’s maybe more to things, or there’s something missing to things. Not exactly going back to church, but trying to rediscover spirituality.
Hamish: Yeah, it’s so easy in 2025 maybe to have some sort of spiritual anemia or something, especially when we’re getting a bit older and stuff, and you’re trying to find your way and just making sure you’re heading in the right direction and everything, you need something more than what’s being presented, whether online or just in the material kind of living.
Tell me about signing for Run For Cover records… why was it important to release your music with them?
Hamish: There were bands from Run For Cover touring through Australia, and Armlock has a bit of a following in the hardcore scene there, so these bands would be coming through, and they’d be like, “Oh, what should we listen to?” And people would tell them they should check out Armlock. So then those bands would go back to Run For Cover and be like, Hey, you should check this out. So it’s very organic, we were very fortunate, it was very word of mouth. That’s kind of how it all happens for Armlock.
It seems to be a great meeting place of hardcore and lighter indie rock sounds, a confluence that seems to be increasingly popular for bands and audiences in their 30s upwards. Why do you think that is, is it just as simple as people growing older and wanting something a little softer for their ears?
Hamish: Yeah, I’ve often had it described to me from from, like hardcore people as: “you can’t listen to hardcore all the time”. Yeah, and Armlock seems to fall into the category of, “Let’s not listen to hardcore right now, so we’ll put this on.” I’m not sure what it is about specifically us or bands like Turnover that makes that an acceptable choice or or a desirable one.
Simon: It was definitely confusing for us at the start, this hardcore crossover thing. But having played a lot more shows with hardcore bands and watching the emotion they’re communicating. I feel the genesis of the emotion is from a similar place. The final result is obviously extremely different in the way we put it across, but I think the place we’re pulling from emotionally is similar; it’s just a different take on the on a similar story or something.
The label re-released Trust this year, which was actually your first album. What’s it like re-releasing older material after picking up traction from Seashell Angel Lucky Charm, which many would’ve assumed was your debut?
Simon: I think it’s a really nice feeling that there was enough passion there at least for Run For Cover to want to shine more light onto it. Obviously it’s our first offering, we’re really proud of it, but I think it felt very like our first attempt. I think in previous projects, we’ve done at least your first your first record is kind of forgotten about, and you kind of want people to forget about them a lot of the time because they’re rough. But it feels really nice that people want to shine more light on the first thing we did. I think it’s important for us as well to keep in touch with that first record as well, just because it’s so tempting to move away and progress as fast as you can. But there’s something about that first one that I think has a lot of elements that we should keep reminding ourselves of.
Hamish: Yeah, definitely. To reiterate that, it’s so easy now that records get forgotten about, especially when you’re dealing , the Spotify interface, there’ are so many albums that just disappear through a cascade of sub menus. It’s nice just to give it another prompt, because it’s a record I think we’re both really proud of, and it has a bit of a small cult following it was really nice to get it a bit of a reminder.
Around the time of the original release in 2021, in interviews you both mentioned a chaotic or messy method of working. Has that approach finessed at all in recent years?
Hamish: It’s not so much that it’s necessarily messy, it’s probably more that you can’t sleep on it, it’s not the same thing every time. So it can be kind of frustrating, there’s just no formula, like it’s us sitting in our studios, and just chipping away. And sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.
Simon: Yeah, we don’t really write songs and then record them. I think we the writing and the recording process happens at the same time. So a lot of the times we’re recording with absolutely no idea where it’s going and I think inherently that just kind of can create some wacky situations and kind of chaotic Ableton sessions, because you’re recording something, and then you realise, oh, this should be a drastically different tempo, and you change that, and then you change key along the way. So half the sounds are recorded in one key and half the sounds recorded in another key, and you’re kind of mashing them together with pitch shifters and stuff.
Hamish: And then someone pulls in a different sound from a different session or…
Simon: Or a YouTube video or something. Although the songs sound very minimal, the projects themselves are like…
Hamish: Yeah that’s because there’s like 87 tracks that are muted haha.
Simon: Yeah, a lot of stuff that we’ve tried but were a terrible idea.
There are some exceptions, but mostly Seashell maintains this melancholic through line. But that feels lifted somewhat in recent single ‘Strobe’: what can you tell me about that?
Simon: Yeah, I think they definitely wanted to try and push a more positive message, a bit more hopeful. Since the first record, at least in my life, family has become a lot more important. The family is growing and time is getting harder and harder to find. Priorities are changing and you’re kind of just realising what’s important, what you need, what you want to fight for. I think the lyrics are always just changing with what’s happening in life, and at the moment that’s kind of the thing, fighting for the people you love, trying to keep everyone together. It’s less about chasing the chasing the bag these days.
Hamish: More about a bit of gratitude!
