Armlock - Amazing Armlock

The mark of any great artist is the capacity to retain a beginner’s mind, to continue loving the thing you love while learning how to fold in what you learn as you grow. That’s true of Armlock, the Australian duo of Simon Lam and Hamish Mitchell, and integral to the creation of their new album, Amazing. Bringing an electronic approach to the creation of deeply human indie rock, they’ve boiled their sound to its most crucial elements, distilling all the character and feeling that makes their music resonant.

Friends for nearly two decades, Lam and Mitchell met studying jazz at Monash University in Melbourne and eventually explored various musical projects together, primarily in the experimental electronic scene. But Armlock was formed from their shared desire to push outside of their collective comfort zone, and that began with both of them learning something new: guitar. “We both started playing guitar for the first time pretty much when the band started,” explains Lam. “It was like ‘ok, we’re gonna make guitar music because we don’t really know how to do that and
it will be an exciting challenge.” Mitchell adds, “Even now I would say my main influence for Armlock is just physically playing the guitar–it’s still so foreign to me, not like piano where I know my way around, so I’m always discovering something on the instrument itself.”

Amazing is the band’s third release following 2021’s Trust and 2024’s Seashell Angel Lucky Charm, and it’s their most substantial to date, stretching out past seven songs for the first time and perfectly atomizing everything that makes Armlock so special. “We wanted this one to sort of feel like a culmination of this era of the band,” says Lam, “I think we were keen to find the center of this sound we’ve been shooting for the past few years. We wanted it to be the most Armlock record it could be.”

Amazing captures that dichotomy, a balance of soul and precision, spontaneity and meticulousness—an airtight beat here, an icy sharp guitar line there, flashes of peculiar vocal samples, an unexpected sound effect stretched out past all recognition. It all coalesces into music that drips with intentionality and, in turn, allows you to delight in the sum of its parts.