On “The Weight”, Ontario’s Arm’s Length cut right to the bone. This final single before their upcoming sophomore album ‘There’s A Whole World Out There’ is raw, relentless, and painfully intimate – the sort of track that doesn’t just ask you to feel, it forces you to.
Where previous singles “Funny Face” and “You Ominously End” hinted at emotional depth, “The Weight” dives headfirst into it. With a vocal performance from Allen Steinberg that teeters between cathartic wail and whispered confession, this track is rooted in the personal but universally resonant. It’s about eating disorders, self-worth, and the aching desire to disappear, to become so small you no longer feel. But this isn’t just lyrical vulnerability, it’s weaponised honesty, and it hits hard.
Musically, “The Weight” is Arm’s Length at their most dynamic. Gentle guitar lines wrap around Steinberg’s voice in the first half, like nervous fingers tracing a scar, before erupting into a climactic chorus that recalls the emotional wallop of Foxing or early Citizen. There’s a careful tension here, space and silence balanced with crashing distortion, that shows just how far the band has evolved since their debut.
Produced once again by Anton DeLost, the track sounds huge without being polished into oblivion. It still breathes. It still aches. String flourishes and piano glimmers (from Bonnie Brooksbank and Alex Scalzo-Brown) flesh out the emotion even further, adding cinematic weight to a track that was already collapsing under emotional gravity.
Steinberg’s candid admission that this period marked “the most mentally ill [he’d] ever been” is no throwaway quote. You hear every ounce of it. And yet, “The Weight” never feels like wallowing, it’s a release, a reckoning, and a way forward. That’s what makes this track (and this band) so vital.
🎧 Best listened to with headphones on, lights off, and your heart wide open.
Album drops May 16th via Pure Noise Records, and if “The Weight” is anything to go by, it’s going to wreck you in the best way possible.
THE FRONT ROW 
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