Sid The Cat Presents Armlock 2/8/2027 at Permanent Records Roadhouse 21+ 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.”