Photo Credit: Alex S K Brown
The Brooklyn-based band San Fermin has announced their fifth studio album Arms will be released on February 16, 2024 via their burgeoning indie label Better Company Records. The 9 song album marks a new direction for the eight-piece band, as they strip away much of the sonic ornamentation they’ve come to be known for in favor of a more raw, direct sound reflective of Ellis Ludwig-Leone’s candid, plainspoken lyrics.
They have also released the official video for the new single “Didn’t Want You To” and announced a 2024 national headline tour that will kick off on March 23, 2024 in Salt Lake City, and will make stops in New York, Chicago, Nashville, Los Angeles and many more. Find a full list of tour dates at their website. Tickets go on sale this Friday, October 27.
Watch the official video for “Didn’t Want You To.”
Pre-Order/Pre-Save Arms here.
About the song, Ludwig-Leone explains: “I had this feeling after going through a breakup, like, ‘well screw you, if you don’t want to be with me, I don’t want to be with you,’ which turns out to be a pretty universal feeling. The wordplay was fun, messing around with different inflections of the refrain to hint at different meanings.”
Arms was written during one of the most difficult moments of Ellis Ludwig-Leone’s life, following the dissolution of two relationships. Over the course of the album’s nine stunning tracks, his 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. “I was going through a crisis,” Ludwig-Leone explains. “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.”
Adds producer and vocalist Allen Tate, “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. 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.”
Ten years ago, San Fermin released their critically heralded eponymous album and rocketed to a national audience with NPR inviting them to play a Tiny Desk Concert and calling the album “one of the year’s most surprising, ambitious, evocative and moving records” as well as Pitchfork praising their “ambitious chamber pop debut.” Over the next decade the band would release four albums and become known for their “knack for simultaneously expressing beauty and crisis” (The New Yorker). Arms is the greatest testament to the community the band has built over the last decade, and illustrates their ability to transform crisis into a communal catharsis.
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).
