Narrow Arm start with a room. “Ticking Clock” comes from three players tracking primarily live inside Distorted Forest Studio, a barn in the Rhode Island woods that Jared has spent 12 years turning into a recording space. The song carries that choice in its spine: post-rock reach pulled into a tighter, more punk-minded body, with the rhythm section doing more than marking time.
The Providence, Rhode Island project are built from members whose other bands include Twin Foxes, Snowplows and Video Shoppe. Their first single, “Ticking Clock“, premieres ahead of an EP set for release on October 2, and it puts their shared history to work without turning Narrow Arm into a side note for any of those bands.
Jared moves from guitar and vocals in Twin Foxes to drums here. Jesse, usually a guitar player in Snowplows, moves to bass. Tavis brings the guitar in without a stated map for what the band were supposed to become.
“We came together because I think we wanted to try something different after all being in our bands for about a decade,” Jared says. “We talked about it at a mutual friend’s wedding reception and basically agreed to jam and see what happens.” He says he had started to feel stale, and that the instrument switch gave him a different problem to solve. Jesse’s switch to bass did the same from another angle.
That lack of assigned roles matters more than any clean genre explanation. Jared likes bands where no one is telling anyone else what to do, where each player brings their own personality and lets it show, even when the parts rub against each other. Songs, he says, tend to happen fast in Narrow Arm, and playing different instruments keeps the project away from their older muscle memory.
Tavis came into the first practices with the same absence of instruction. “We never actually really discussed in any form what we were going to play when we got together,” he says. He had played shows with Jared and Jesse’s previous bands, and knew some of their tastes, but he was also trying to find a guitar approach that satisfied what he wanted to express without scaring the other two off. Narrow Arm, to him, are still changing shape.
Jesse hears the band as three sets of habits trying to cohere. Some ideas do not lock, which is part of the point. Others land in a way that feels larger than the individual parts, and the band try to follow that when it happens.
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Distorted Forest was the obvious place to record because it is also where Narrow Arm practise. It is Jared’s studio, and engineering and mixing bands there is his full-time job. He calls the place a labour of love: a converted barn in the woods of Rhode Island, built out over 12 years, isolated enough to keep distractions low and connected enough to be a working home for New England punk and experimental bands.
Jared’s connection to the local scene has run through his own bands, but these days he says the studio is the bigger link. He has made friends there, made records that matter to him there, and built a live room that let Narrow Arm chase one joined sound rather than three separate parts stacked together later. Tavis wanted that sense of space in the recording. Jesse describes himself as lucky to have played with “enablers”: people who bring creativity, care about recording, provide a room, a vehicle for gear, or enough enthusiasm to keep a band moving. Jared and Tavis fit that category for him. Without that kind of support, Jesse says, he is not sure how much of his own music would exist outside his head.
The band’s own shorthand is a slightly more punk take on post-rock. Jared’s version of that starts with the rhythm section. He wanted post-rock to feel more aggressive and more muscled from the drums and bass, pushing against the drum-machine feel and simplified playing he associates with parts of the genre. Some of the playing, he says, leans almost street punk, which lets Narrow Arm twist a familiar post-punk sound from underneath rather than stretch it out politely.
Tavis hears the same pull in opposites: body and head, immediate and distant, acute and obtuse, spiritual and sceptical, urgent and measured. “Post-rock, yet punk rock would be the most casual way of describing it,” he says. Jesse cuts the theory down to one line: “All music can be jazz if you believe in yourself.”
The record almost started in a much more ordinary way. Tavis lives out on Cape Cod, almost two hours from Jared and Jesse, so their first attempts at recording were done alone and sent around as files. Jared liked the rough practice demos enough to realise the songs needed the three of them in the room. Jared describes the goal as “one big sound vs individual sounds layered on top of each other,” and says that was best achieved by recording together in a room. “That real time communication is the special stuff that you don’t get when you record one by one to a click,” he says.
The pivot was less about nostalgia than feel. The songs needed their own push and pull, and Jared wanted to keep the parts where the band were reacting in real time. “I’d prefer to chase a real moment than ‘perfection’,” he says. “With so much AI and over-editing these days, it’s so refreshing to hear a real band playing together.”
Tavis says live tracking served this collection of songs best. Jesse had already had good luck cutting basic tracks this way with Snowplows, and he liked doing it again with musicians who were solid and consistent without acting like perfectionists or robots. Flubs, for him, can be part of the magic.
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Justin Pizzoferrato mastered the EP at Sonelab, bringing a credit list that includes Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth and Parquet Courts. Jared has been working with Justin more lately and says he tends to understand the room the band are aiming for. Justin liked the mixes, used a light touch, and the revisions moved quickly. The brief was simple enough: keep it a little aggressive, but big and open. Tavis says Justin was responsive to that vision. Jesse gives credit both to Justin’s mastering and to Jared and Tavis for having the vocabulary, patience and skill to get the mixes into the right place before handing them over.
“Ticking Clock” was chosen first because it sits in the middle of the EP rather than at either edge. Jared says it is not as thick in arrangement as some of the other songs, but not as simple as the opener, and he hears it as a good picture of three players meeting in the room. Tavis calls it a “tip of the spear” for the rest of the EP, with the essential sounds and ideas present before the other tracks approach them from different angles. Jesse calls it propulsive and catchy, an introduction that hints at what else is coming.
For outside reference points, Narrow Arm name Echo and the Bunnymen, Interpol and Facs. Those coordinates make sense in the guitar space, the bass movement and the refusal to let the song sit fully inside post-rock patience or post-punk cool. What keeps it closer to the Providence underground than to a playlist lane is the way it was made: three people with older bands behind them, changing instruments, testing the room, and deciding that the take with the human drag in it was the one worth keeping.
They have only played two shows so far. Jared thinks Narrow Arm stick out in Providence because they are doing something new and different there, and he likes that the city can put very different bands together without the room turning cold on a mismatched bill. Tavis sees Providence as a place that supports artistic ideas, and he wants to bring Narrow Arm further through Providence, New England and the Northeast.
Jesse is more careful about making claims for the current local scene. He says it may be age, personal circumstances, or both, but post-quarantine he has played and attended fewer shows than he did between 2009 and 2019. He knows there is likely a lot of good local music around Providence that he has not caught yet. Playing more Narrow Arm shows may change that.
“I’m hoping that playing more shows will also lead to discovering and enjoying more local bands,” he says. “Definitely a silver lining there.”
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