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It started with a late night phone call. “I was going through a crisis,” says San Fermin bandleader Ellis Ludwig-Leone. “My relationship of ten years had recently ended, and then, not thinking very clearly, I dove into another relationship. Before I knew it, that one ended too.”
Lost and a little lonely, Ludwig-Leone dialed up his closest confidante and collaborator, San Fermin vocalist Allen Tate, to talk it out.
“About 30 minutes into the call I remembered Allen was on his honeymoon in Hawaii and it was like 4am there,” Ludwig-Leone laughs. “But he still picked up, and that conversation is where this album really began.”
Written in the topsy-turvy days that followed, San Fermin’s poignant new record, Arms, is a testament to the power of that friendship, and to the band’s ability to transform pain and isolation into catharsis. The songs are lean and muscular here, stripping away much of the sonic ornamentation the Brooklyn eight-piece has come to be known for in favor of a more raw, direct sound reflective of Ludwig-Leone’s candid, plainspoken lyrics. Tate and fellow vocalist Claire Wellin get similarly vulnerable in their delivery, breathing deep empathy and compassion into Ludwig-Leone’s piercing reflections on heartbreak, desire, and healing. The result is a collection that balances devastation and optimism in equal measure.
“When your life turns upside down, there’s humor mixed in with all the grief and confusion,” Ludwig-Leone explains. “Allen was always there for me, but I could also see him getting a certain amusement from watching me twist in the wind, and there was something really helpful and grounding about having someone like that to keep things in perspective.”
And perspective is ultimately what Arms is all about. Over the course of the album’s nine stunning tracks, Ludwig-Leone’s lyrics move from anger and disappointment to clarity and acceptance in a steady progression reflective of the roller coaster journey that consumed him for the better part of a year.
“The way this band is structured with Ellis writing the songs and Claire and I singing them, I’ve always felt like my role is to be both a mouthpiece and a filter,” says Tate, who also produced the record. “When you go through a breakup, you deal with so many different feelings in such a short period of time, and I tried to just be there to listen and help harness the fire hose of emotion Ellis was experiencing so we could distill it down into its purest form.”
It’s a partnership that’s served the band well since 2013, when San Fermin rose to immediate acclaim on the strength of their self-titled debut, which Ludwig-Leone had initially envisioned as a one-off project featuring more than 20 different collaborators. NPR hailed the album as “one of the year's most surprising, ambitious, evocative and moving records,” while Pitchfork called breakout single “Sonsick” “deliriously infectious,” and Esquire dubbed it “instantly memorable and highly addictive.” Buoyed by the record’s success, Ludwig-Leone put together a full-time band and hit the road, performing everywhere from the Tiny Desk to Lollapalooza and sharing bills with the likes of alt-J, Courtney Barnett, the National, and St. Vincent. In the years to come, the group would go on to release three more widely lauded albums, prompting The New Yorker to celebrate their “knack for simultaneously expressing beauty and crisis,” and Rolling Stone to declare them as “masters of highbrow chamber pop.”
When it came to recording Arms, though, Ludwig-Leone and Tate felt compelled to take a more minimalist approach. They pared back the densely layered instrumentation of their first four albums and instead leaned into a more stark, spare take on indie rock, which felt both timely and appropriate.
“The last few years were dramatic enough,” Ludwig-Leone explains. “I didn’t feel the need to dress it up.”
While Tate had been recording albums for the likes of Wild Pink, Daisy the Great, and Annie Blackman at Better Company Studios (the Brooklyn recording space he and Ludwig-Leone opened as a hub for their Better Company Records label in 2021), Arms marked his first chance to produce a full San Fermin album there, and the experience was liberating.
“Being in our own studio meant we could take our time and make sure everyone was comfortable and confident,” Tate explains. “We sent some pretty simple demos around to lay the groundwork, but we were also really open to everyone coming in with their own ideas and trusting that things would change and evolve naturally, which is ultimately what we wanted this album to sound like: the eight of us in a room, all working together to make something really special.”
That chemistry is palpable on Arms, which opens with the driving “Weird Environment.” Fueled by an electrifying, manic energy, the song presses forward through a surreal, washed-out sonic landscape, relentlessly trying to outrun the darkness that threatens to overtake it. Like much of the album, “Weird Environment” manages to find humor in the midst of all the heartache, staring into the looming abyss and laughing at the utter absurdity of it all. “Wrote a sad song to get it out,” Tate sings in a deadpan baritone. “If it helped I didn’t notice.” The dreamy “Didn’t Want You To” offers a tongue in cheek kiss-off in the face of rejection (“If you didn’t want me / I didn’t want you to” Wellin proclaims in the cathartic chorus), while the lilting “Can’t Unsee It” transforms self-pity into self-deprecation, and the hypnotic “Makes Me Want You” reckons with our desire for love we know will never be reciprocated.
By the album’s second half, the songs begin to feel more settled, more at peace with how little control we have over our lives. The romantic title track surrenders to the helplessness of falling back in love, for better or for worse; the dreamy “My Love is a Loneliness” takes a bird’s eye view of heartbreak, finding solace in the cyclical nature of loss and redemption; and the unvarnished album closer “You Owe Me” makes peace with lingering resentment, letting it drift off like the last wisps of smoke from some long-extinguished fire.
“There’s obviously such a rich history of breakup albums, and I know this is just one coin dropped in that well,” says Ludwig-Leone. “But I wrote it in order to turn a difficult experience into something solid, valuable, and even joyful, and then let it go. There’s an alchemy that happens when you share it with others.”
That sense of connection and community is the reason Ludwig-Leone writes. It’s the reason Tate picked up the phone at 4am. It’s the reason the pair estimate they’ve worked with more than 200 artists in their studio, on everything from albums to ballets to musicals to operas. It’s the reason San Fermin exists, and the reason Arms is the band’s most compelling, unforgettable work yet.
San Fermin is Ellis Ludwig-Leone (bandleader, songwriter), Allen Tate (vocalist, producer), Claire Wellin (vocalist), Akira Ishiguro (guitar), John Brandon (trumpet), Stephen Chen (saxophone), Tyler McDiarmid (guitar), and Griffin Brown (drums).