“Fragment I” spends a lot of time with things that don’t resolve neatly.
Death arrives with a sudden moment of clarity. Old friendships turn into something painful and hard to explain. Sleep disappears and leaves paranoia in its place. Even when something good finally breaks through, there’s still a question hanging over it: do I deserve this?
As Living Arrows have packed all of that into four songs.
The UK band still describe themselves as screamo, but this EP pulls some of the weight away from the longer post-metal shapes of “Hope And Ruin” and lets their emo and math-rock side come further forward. They’d been talking for a while about making something shorter and more immediate. “Fragment I” is where that idea starts becoming tangible.
It isn’t lighter exactly. The subjects are bleak enough. But there is more room for hope to keep interrupting them.
That tension is clearest on the amazing opener, “Epiphany“, a song about approaching death that refuses to stay completely buried in grief.
Pete Fox wrote the lyrics around terminal lucidity, the unexpected return of mental clarity that can sometimes happen shortly before somebody dies. He’d seen it happen to people in his own family.
“There have been family members in my life that have experienced a moment of terminal lucidity prior to passing away and that’s what I wanted to capture. A moment of clarity before the end. When you realise that all you want is to be surrounded by close friends and family. An acceptance of the end, welcomed with open arms, with those you love beside you.”
The lyrics start with somebody nearing the end of life and trying to accept what is happening. Then the song opens out.
“I never thought that I was good enough” eventually gives way to “I’ve never been so close to something right.” Later comes “my life will go on inside of your eyes.”
Death is still coming. The song just stops treating that as the only thing left in the room.
Even its long route into existence says something about where As Living Arrows are now.
“Epiphany” goes back to the “Hope And Ruin” period. They’d been trying to make it work for years.
It was their first song written in FACGCE, the tuning closely associated with American Football, although their original plan had almost nothing to do with that reference point. They were trying to write doom metal.
For ages the demo was jokingly called “American Doomball”, then simply “Doomball”. Some of the guys apparently still call it that.
What eventually unlocked it was the collision Pete describes between blast beats and the much brighter math-rock idea running through the song.
“Writing this song and combining the heavy blast beats with the twinkly math rock riff was an exciting moment for us. We realised quickly that this was the sound we wanted to explore as a band.”
That push between heaviness and release runs through “Fragment I“.
The EP can get miserable, anxious and ugly, but it rarely sits in one emotional place for very long. There is usually something pulling the other way: nostalgia inside bitterness, light inside dread, forgiveness creeping into shame.
“Broken Bones” is probably the clearest example.
Its lyrics move between childhood memories and adult damage. There are treehouses, summer days and promises made years ago, but they’re being remembered while standing over a grave.
Then those memories start curdling.
“The child grows up enough / to feel pain and the hurt / that was once concealed / under the bed.”
Pete’s starting point was partly literary.
While reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment“, he wrote down a line in his notes:
“Raskolnikov sold his soul for a bag of golden rings.”
Eventually it became:
“Lucifer sold his soul for a bag of broken bones.”
The bones may have come from somewhere much less literary. Arthur, who runs Shaken Oak Studios in Oxfordshire, had broken his wrist in a bike accident while the band were there.
Pete kept digging into Dostoevsky anyway, particularly the strange relationship between Raskolnikov and investigator Petrovich, two people circling each other while guilt keeps tightening around one of them.
For Pete, that fed into something closer to home.
“Broken Bones” became a song about a relationship in which both people have been hurt and neither quite understands how they got there. Shame keeps hanging around. So does the wish that somehow things could go back to what they were.
The lyric “the wallflower is now the detective” catches some of that shift nicely. Somebody who once stood quietly inside the relationship is now outside it, inspecting what went wrong.
“Wraiths” is darker.
There is very little distance between the narrator and whatever is going wrong inside his head.
“I’m losing sleep / I’m losing dreams.”
“The voices only come at night.”
Later: “you will destroy yourself again.”
Pete described the song through a day-and-night split. The daytime sections are exhausted and defeated. Night is when everything accelerates: insomnia, fever dreams, addiction, paranoia and the fear that you’re becoming somebody you don’t recognise.
“The song is about struggling with insomnia, fever dreams and addiction. It’s about laying awake at night and stewing in paranoia and fear.”
There is guilt here too, but it is much less reflective than on “Broken Bones“. “Wraiths” is caught inside the cycle.
The person in the song knows things are collapsing and still can’t quite stop repeating them.
“Holding on to this life / but I don’t know why / clinging onto things / I never wanted in the first place / and constantly watching doors / closing in my face / and hurting everyone I know in the process.”
Before they settled on “Wraiths“, the song went through titles including “Conduits”, “White Night Agony” and “Nuit Blanche”, the French expression for a sleepless night.
It also came together in a way that is very As Living Arrows.
Tim Dorning and Matias Ponce already had guitar ideas Pete liked, but he spent around an hour getting nowhere with the bass before finally finding the part that became the opening.
The band had returned to Shaken Oak in September 2025 for one of the short, concentrated writing periods that keep As Living Arrows going.
None of them live especially close together. There are day jobs, families and other bands to work around, so they tend to disappear for stretches and then throw themselves into a few days of writing when everyone can finally be in the same room.
They call the gaps hibernation.
That rhythm existed long before “Fragment I“.
“Hope And Ruin” had been written during ten days at Shaken Oak, with most of the songs appearing pretty spontaneously. They finished recording the album in October 2023, but it wasn’t released until September 2024.
By then they’d already spent close to two years playing much of it at gigs.
That distance became relevant again recently.
When we first spoke to As Living Arrows about “Hope And Ruin” in 2024, then-vocalist Thomas “Tom” Wagstaff gave us an unusually self-critical track-by-track account of the record.
Two years later, the band don’t quite hear it through the same lens.
They eventually decided the old comments were worth leaving where they were.
“I think let’s just leave the article up, it’s a time capsule of how we were feeling about the record at the time so in the interest of artistic integrity we’ve decided changing it would be worse than just leaving it up!”
The useful part of that exchange isn’t whether every opinion from 2024 survived. It’s what happens when a band gets enough distance from a record to understand why they made it.
They’re proud of “Hope And Ruin” now.
It was the first full record that line-up made together and, in their words, part of figuring out what “our sound” actually meant.
“Looking at it as a time capsule helps us remember the experience of writing together and how excited we all were for what we were creating, and we still feel that excitement when we play the songs.”
A lot happened after it.
Tom left As Living Arrows towards the end of 2025.
The rest of the band never really questioned whether they would continue, but they didn’t treat his departure as something minor either.
“We owe Tom a lot, the band wouldn’t exist without him and his creativity was a huge part of our songwriting process, so it did feel like a big gap to fill when he called it a day.”
Tom’s voice had been one of the band’s most identifiable elements. He had also written all of the lyrics.
Pete had already been playing bass and doing backing vocals, but “Fragment I” is the first As Living Arrows release with him handling the lead voice and the words.
He didn’t want to reproduce what Tom had done.
That makes the lyrical character of this EP more significant than a simple line-up change.
Pete’s writing is constantly looking at people trying to get out from under themselves.
Sometimes that means death and acceptance, as on “Epiphany“. Sometimes it’s the lingering damage between two people on “Broken Bones“. “Wraiths” is trapped in insomnia and self-destruction.
Then “Karma” turns the same instinct back towards responsibility.
Pete brought the song to the band in a much more complete state than the others. They pushed it further into the heavier math-rock direction they’d been exploring, but its centre is a question.
“Do I deserve this?”
Pete didn’t want the answer fixed.
Bad things happen and you wonder what you did to deserve them. Good things happen and the same doubt can appear from the other direction.
The lyrics keep moving between those two possibilities.
“I can see the sunlight / I can see it shining through the clouds.”
Then comes “karma’s kiss”, debts, mistakes, being “a marked man” and the wonderfully blunt line:
“your heart: / feels too much”
Pete connects the song to ego, self-sabotage and the effort required to become somebody better without pretending the past disappeared.
“We’ve all made mistakes, it’s about forgiving yourself, and others, so that we can all find ourselves in a better place.”
There’s a lot of self-examination across these four songs, but “Fragment I” isn’t four versions of the same bad mood.
“Epiphany” reaches towards acceptance. “Broken Bones” looks backwards. “Wraiths” is the record at its most trapped and nocturnal. “Karma” asks whether change is possible once you’ve understood your own part in the mess.
That range also fits the way the band write together.
“Epiphany” had survived from the previous album’s era. “Broken Bones” grew out of riffs Tim brought in. “Karma” arrived from Pete nearly complete. “Wraiths” came out of a jam.
None stayed exactly as it entered the room.
“The best thing about our process is that an idea is never set in stone when we bring it to the table, so all of the songs turned out quite different to the original demos and we’ve all gotten better at letting our ideas be beaten into shape by the rest of the band!”
That looseness carried into the recording.
They worked with Mark Roberts at Brighton Electric Studios, where the EP was also mixed. Chris Collis already knew Mark and the room through previous sessions, so there wasn’t much anxiety about whether it would work.
As Living Arrows still wanted the recordings to behave like the band does at gigs.
They avoid piling on things they couldn’t realistically reproduce as four people, and this time they also stopped using a click track.
“Hope And Ruin” had been recorded to one. Looking back, that’s one of the few production choices they say they’d change.
“We also recorded these songs without a click, because we naturally push and pull tempos when we play live together and we wanted to preserve that feel for the recordings.”
They also moved from tape to digital recording, which made the sessions less unforgiving and gave them more freedom to decide which mistakes actually mattered.
Chris later mastered the EP at CC Mastering.
The title “Fragment I” leaves the next part intentionally unresolved.
The immediate point was to get something out with this version of As Living Arrows and start moving towards the kind of songs they’d already been discussing before Tom left: more concise, more immediate, with the band’s math-rock and emo influences closer to the surface.
They’d like to release more “Fragments”.
Those may eventually form a full album. They may not.
The band aren’t pretending to know yet.
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The earliest new ideas are apparently leaning towards the more euphoric side of “Epiphany“, although Tim isn’t expecting the misery to disappear entirely.
“The early ideas we’re working on definitely lean towards the euphoric sound of Epiphany, but we’ll always be sad boys at heart so the darker side will rear its head again without a doubt.”
That sentence probably sums up “Fragment I” better than any genre tag could.
There is plenty of darkness here, but the EP keeps looking for the crack where something else can get through.
A dying person reaches for the people around them. An old relationship still contains memories worth mourning. Somebody lying awake inside their own paranoia knows the damage they’re doing. Somebody else looks at karma, guilt and forgiveness and asks whether they might still deserve the light coming through the clouds.
As Living Arrows aren’t claiming to have answers to any of it.
They’re still four friends getting into a room whenever life allows it and pushing each other’s ideas around until the songs start making sense.
“Ultimately this is a band of friends smashing sounds we like together until something interesting takes shape, and we’ll continue to do our best to create art that’s meaningful and lights a fire inside us.”
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“Fragment I” was released through the band’s Bandcamp on August 14, 2026, before reaching streaming services in full on October 16. The EP was recorded and mixed by Mark Roberts, mastered by Chris Collis at CC Mastering, with artwork by Chloe McCormack. There is currently no physical edition, with the band choosing instead to give Bandcamp an early window for direct support before the wider streaming release.
As Living Arrows are taking “Fragment I” back out on the road this autumn. They play Cardiff, Birmingham and Leeds on October 28, 29 and 30, with Every Hell joining them for that run.
November brings another five UK shows: Nottingham on November 13, followed by Glasgow, Aberdeen, Inverness and Edinburgh from November 19 through 22, this time with Codespeaker and Palejoy.
“Fragment I” is out now on Bandcamp and streaming platforms.
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