A couple weeks ago we helped premier the video for “Small Death,” which is not only an incredible ripper of a mathcore song, it’s an important moment in the career of Florida’s Arms.
As described in that article, the band’s freakishly hot streak in the late 2010’s was followed by a lengthy period of relative silence, and it left many of us wondering what had happened. However, after this chat with Paul Hundeby, we totally get it.
Time moves a little too fast sometimes, and even when you’ve got your eye on the ball and maintain focus, the day-to-day becomes the month-to-month, and all the sudden years have gone by. Luckily, this isn’t a situation where there’s not much to show for it – the new Arms album I WISH YOU WERE DOWN HERE WITH ME is utterly stacked, not just with incredible features and credits but a massive track list as well. Clearly, the years have been well spent.
Plus, not only are they emerging from unofficial hiatus with a new record, they’re coming out swinging with new masters of some of their old classics. They even go so far as to call the footage rescued, and Paul goes into this towards the end but his take on it was actually quite refreshing. It certainly helps that the new mix is killer. Check out the remastered video for “Triune Braine” below:
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Hundeby was extremely forthcoming in this interview and we are really excited for fans to read it – he goes into the long wait, the massive guest list, the effort to reclaim the older material, and so much more. Don’t forget to pre-order the record here if you haven’t already, and without further ado, please enjoy!
FB: You guys put out a pretty impressive one-two punch with 2016’s BLACKOUT and 2018’s split with Seizures – but we’re getting pretty close to the ten year mark since any new music. What have you been up to? Just livin’ life or other musical endeavors?
A lot has transpired between when the album was started and where it is now, as it finally moves toward release. There have been significant life events along the way, but the truth is that the album genuinely did take this long to complete. There were long periods where I was working on it entirely by myself, though I’m not sure how much of the work could have realistically been delegated. The direction was extremely complicated and, at a certain point, so much of the production and engineering was tied to very specific decisions that it became difficult to separate from the process itself.
It was a very collaborative endeavor in the beginning, but once all of the instruments were tracked, the album entered a much longer period of additional production, engineering, and refinement to get it to where it ultimately landed. There really wasn’t a point where quality was compromised for the sake of getting it finished. Everything was approached with the intention of doing it as well as it could possibly be done, even when that meant taking significantly more time.
There were also periods where my work on the album had to stop for reasons that had nothing to do with the music itself. Buying a house and building a studio, for example, created logistical realities that simply couldn’t be worked around. So while a lot of the time was spent obsessively working on the record, some of it was also dictated by life happening around it. In the end, the timeline is long because the record required it, both creatively and practically.
FB: We’re no stranger to taking musical breaks – was there a particular moment you started wanting to put more ARMS music together?
I desperately wanted to share it the entire time. It was a strange, arduous, and cathartic process that became quite an investment of my life, to the point where I sometimes felt like I was sinking into it. It became difficult to conceptualize investing that much time into something that, from a conventional, commercial, or even practical perspective, could be questioned: Does this actually need to be finished? Will people really benefit from hearing something that I’m sacrificing so much of my life to put out? Is this something they even think about anymore, or could they just as easily live without ever knowing it existed?
But I knew I had to finish what I started. And very quickly after we did the first single premiere with you guys, I started seeing the undying support and enthusiasm from people who had been waiting for this. That made it much easier to understand that, even after all that time, there were still people who genuinely wanted to hear it.
FB: One thing we love talking to bands about is how their environment factors into their music, if it does at all – would you say Orlando or the surrounding areas have any influence on your songwriting?
In a way, yes, it does play a factor. But more in the sense that I put myself and the music into its own world, where it could slowly be refined and allowed to exist until it was fully incubated into the vision and potential I felt it had. I took that idea pretty far, even building my own studio around the production of the record and continuing to develop the studio into its final form while I was working on it. The studio itself was still evolving right up until I was printing the final mixes. In a strange way, the environment and the album were developing alongside each other until both ultimately reached the point where they could be finished.
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FB: What was it like recollecting / reassembling the band?
It was really exciting getting the band set up again. We definitely missed playing live during the hiatus. I missed the connections that happen at shows, the opportunity to travel, meet new people, and experience all the things that come with sharing music with other people. Live performance is inevitably a huge part of growing a band, and after being away from it for so long, we’re very excited to start playing shows again and get back out there. We’re currently looking at which states we want to hit first and planning some smaller tours to get things moving.
A large part of the album was completed by myself over the past few years, and that can be a pretty lonely process. That’s actually part of the reason I wanted to bring features and collaborations into the album, to bring that sense of shared creation back into the process. So it was a really good feeling to finally have everyone back in the same room again. We pretty much jumped right back into it without much hesitation and immediately started planning the last few steps needed to get the album released.
We really did get to work immediately. We started planning and shooting several music videos, figuring out the logistics of the release, and agreeing on some important commitments we needed to make to give the album the release we felt it deserved. After spending so many years working on the record itself, it was exciting to finally have everyone together again and be focused on actually bringing it into the world.
FB: Were there any things you wanted to do differently this time around, other than try to make the sickest ARMS records yet?
Yeah, definitely. There’s a thought process like that behind every project I work on: How can this be improved? Why are we making this record? And how does it coincide with innovation? There have to be goals when starting something this involved, even if some of them are clearer than others.
We knew this release had to be a significant progression from the last one. BLACKOUT was really the first serious effort toward Arms becoming a band, but in many ways it was still a solo project that was made for the fun of doing it. There was a lot of skill and technicality that I still needed to develop and hone in on for this album. In the years between those two releases, I had refined a huge amount of knowledge around songwriting, production, recording, and engineering. By the time we started working on this record, the limits didn’t really feel like they were there anymore in terms of how difficult or ambitious the material could become. I knew there was going to be an enormous evolution if the two albums were placed next to each other.
We were hungry for that. We needed to push ourselves into the next phase. We wanted to make more of a name for ourselves, but we also wanted to start building some kind of legacy, even if that legacy ultimately exists just for us to look back on.
I think that idea comes from something that has bothered me when I look back at my previous projects. I would release an album with one of my bands, then spend years producing and engineering great records for other people, and feel myself continuing to grow technically and creatively. But when I looked back at the music I had actually released, I didn’t always feel like it represented where I currently was. I could feel this disconnect between the knowledge and experience I had accumulated through working on other people’s music and the portfolio of music that actually carried my name.
That’s something I’ve wanted to correct with Arms. I genuinely like the music I’ve made throughout all of these different projects, but the larger body of work never quite felt like an accurate representation of my current state of knowledge and musical growth. BLACKOUT did remarkably well considering it had no serious PR agency or real marketing experience behind it, but it was still a very raw, crusty-sounding solo project. My old band City of Ifa pushed my guitar playing to its limits at the time, but that material is now old enough that it no longer represents where I am musically.
So a big part of this album was about closing that gap. I wanted to make something that actually reflected the level I felt I had reached, not just in terms of playing or production, but in the way I thought about songwriting, recording, collaboration, and the entire process of making a record. This album needed to feel like a document of where I actually was, rather than another release that would eventually leave me looking back and thinking that I had already grown beyond it.
FB: How did the new record get so many impressive guest features?
Really, it was just about putting myself out there and reaching out to friends we had already made along the way. A lot of these collaborations came from genuine relationships rather than some grand plan to assemble a certain list of names.
Sean from Arsonists Get All the Girls was just an incredibly friendly and genuine person right from the start. We played with them in Orlando, and he was immediately one of the easiest and most genuine band friends I’ve made through playing shows. Chad from Frontierer has supported us twice now, and he’s just a great guy who understands the grind. He has absolutely no ego about it, and every time I get back in contact with him, it feels like no time has passed.
Carson from The Callous Daoboys was really supportive of us when we were first getting started, and it’s been amazing watching his band grow to the extent that it has. I’m really glad they were able to accomplish what so few bands actually manage to make happen.
Jason from The Sawtooth Grin was more of a right-place-right-time situation. They were getting ready to make their comeback album, and I was offering to help with that. While we were discussing the logistics and possibility of me tracking them, I mentioned that I was working on my band’s record and asked if he’d be interested in playing a lead on one of the songs. He ended up writing this really ambient lead part, which I used in the breakdown and then sampled as a production effect throughout other parts of the song.
Cameron from Duhkha is just the best dude ever. We did a little split together a while ago, and he’s been a good friend ever since. He’s literally always offering to help with whatever band or music thing I have going on, so having him involved felt very natural.
Jeff Zampillo from Exotic Animal Petting Zoo is actually featured on a few tracks, playing different types of leads. His main feature is on “Here With Me,” alongside Carson Pace. Then, finishing everything off, we have Manny from Henrietta doing what he does best. He originally came in because a larger feature we had planned fell through for that song, but I’m honestly thankful that it worked out this way. Not only did Manny do an incredible job, but we were able to workshop different ideas together and push the song toward a true climax with the choruses. His bandmate John Chapman also contributed to two newer songs that were added later in the process, “Pass Away” and “Ero Guro.” So even though a lot of these features came about through completely different circumstances, they all ended up becoming a really meaningful part of the record.
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FB: Can you describe your favorite collaborative moments of the record, whether they were with guest features or your bandmates?
This album had a lot of control and foresight from me, but ultimately it was a collaborative effort. There were many crucial points where I always knew I needed to step out of the way and let the best person for the job do what they do best.
That started with Mike and I writing the record together, then him tracking most of the guitars and bass, and with Emmett Ceglia absolutely drilling the album both before and during the studio sessions. He even continued contributing after each session in the evenings with music videos and promo shoots. There were also phases of the album where I needed to be completely alone and have total control over the process, and everyone involved trusted me enough to let me do that.
Then there were all of the incredibly talented musicians who were willing to contribute features based largely on demos of the album and the trust we had built with each other. There was the mastering process with Stephan Hawkes, who showed an incredible amount of patience and respect for my vision and methodology. We ended up working together through a somewhat unconventional stem-mastering process where he printed the first part of his mastering chain and sent those prints back to me so I could make the final tonal decisions, then sent them back to him to finish the loudness stage. That kind of process requires a lot of trust from both sides.
The music videos became another extension of that. My bandmates helped develop the treatments and ideas, then worked with me to actually bring the things I wanted to direct to life. So even though there was a huge amount of solitary time spent working on this album, the collaboration is ultimately what makes the record feel eclectic and special to me.
It’s really the entire process. The moments where I had complete control were important, but so were the moments where I deliberately gave that control to someone else. The album wouldn’t be what it is without both sides of that, and honestly, the collaborative effort is what makes the whole thing feel worthwhile.
FB: Can you describe how you got into videography and what it was like to direct and shoot a video for “SMALL DEATH?”
I honestly don’t have much of a background in videography. At most, I’ve been doing some food photography for a few years. But I knew we needed to start making serious efforts to bring this album to everyone, and I was willing to do whatever it took to make that happen as well as possible.
Producing bands had at least given me the experience to understand the production side of these kinds of projects. You learn how important it is to get the pre-production right so you can build a roadmap of what actually needs to happen. You start satisfying each question with an answer as you go: What do we need? What needs to be ordered? What needs to be researched? How do we actually execute the shots we’ve put on the list? That way, when you get to the actual production, you’re not trying to solve every problem at the same time.
“Small Death” was really about wanting, and needing, to get started. We had cameras that I already owned, along with a somewhat older 4K Sony camera that a friend lent us, and I wanted to utilize everything we had available to us. I wanted to push ourselves creatively and make the first production feel like a statement: we’re back, we’re serious about this, and we’re willing to do whatever it takes to get the point of the music across.
Before that, I had also spent some time finally allowing myself to get deeper into cinematography and filmmaking. Learning what type of directors and films I’m truly passionate about. I knew hiring a director was probably unlikely, especially because we were essentially rebuilding everything from the ground up without the infrastructure or backing of a label. At some point, it just became clear that it was time to get started and figure it out ourselves. For the longest time I didn’t really allow myself to become good at anything else besides music, so I at least wanted to take this opportunity finally explore my passion with visual arts help push this album.
I think that shows in the shot list we put together. Some of the ideas were not easy, and some of them were genuinely dangerous. But it felt like we had reached a point where we had to take it all the way. We were back, and we needed to convey the feelings behind these songs in a way that wasn’t necessarily going to happen for us automatically. If the music wasn’t going to immediately communicate those ideas on its own, then we had to build the visual language around it and find a way to make people feel what we were trying to express.
FB: Speaking of, you’re also re-releasing a couple older videos, like “Triune Brain” from BLACKOUT – what’s it like to remaster video as opposed to audio in your experience?
Yeah! We’re re-releasing two older music videos that we made, “Triune Brain” and “Ceremonial Monster,” which are no longer listed on YouTube.
It honestly bummed me out for a long time that we didn’t have all of our assets properly archived and organized in one place. I think that was one of the downfalls of our earlier career, we didn’t have the professional infrastructure or presence that we aspire to have now. Whether it was getting music onto streaming platforms in a timely fashion or simply being more careful with important assets like music videos, there were a lot of things we didn’t think about at the time that became much more important later.
Unfortunately, it became pretty clear early on that the original master copies of these two videos probably don’t exist on an archive drive anymore. So I had to do the best I could with what was still available and pull the highest-quality versions I could from the unlisted YouTube links. “Triune Brain,” for example, started out at just over 50MB after downloading it from YouTube’s servers. Which after upscaling and remastering ended 10 times bigger at least.
Starting with that file and bringing it up to 4K with modern software like DaVinci really highlights some of my favorite aspects of archiving and technology in general. There’s something really exciting to me about the preservation of art happening in several different ways at once. Logistically, the fact that this video still exists at all means that it can be recovered, uploaded, and shared again. Even though the original master is essentially gone, there was still a version of the work sitting out there that could be preserved.
Then there’s the technical side of it, where modern tools can actually take that surviving version and make it more accessible to people now. This video was never created or mastered as a 4K production, and the file I had to start with was only a little over 50MB, but now it can exist in a 4K presentation and hold up much better on modern displays. In a weird way, something that should technically be worse off because of its age and because we’re working from a compromised source can actually be presented in a way that’s technically better for the consumer than what was available before.
That’s what I find so interesting about the whole process. You’re not recreating the original piece or pretending that the original master still exists. You’re preserving what survived, then using the technology available now to give that surviving piece the best possible chance of continuing to exist and be experienced.
Another really exciting part is that these aren’t just the old videos being put back online. “Triune Brain” contains a completely remixed and remastered version of the song, and “Ceremonial Monster” will receive the same treatment when we re-release it in about a month. For the videos themselves, I mainly wanted to preserve what was originally there rather than completely reinvent them. The biggest changes were to some of the exterior shots that were filmed on my old iPhone. Those appeared to have never been color corrected, so I added some contrast, saturation, and as much detail enhancement for the entire video as I could without making the footage look unnatural.
I started with “Triune Brain” because that video is tied to Complexity Fest in Haarlem, Netherlands, which was a really important part of our career personally. Every time I land in Europe to do something with music, I immediately tell myself, “This better not be the last time I’m here to do this.” So having that particular video unavailable for so long was especially frustrating to me. It was also really fun to take the band on a 40-minute trip and show them the place in Amsterdam where I played the last time I was there, The Cave. So bringing these videos back isn’t just about having some old content available again. It’s about preserving pieces of our history that I genuinely don’t want to disappear, while also giving them the best version of a future that the original files unfortunately never got to have.
FB: Did going through all the old footage make you nostalgic for times long past or just appreciative of the present?
It’s an interesting feeling. It’s hard to see your own legacy while you’re living it, especially when you’re young and naturally take those experiences for granted at the time. But I think there’s also something almost unavoidable about the way life keeps moving forward. It’s like jumping out of a plane, you can spend your time thinking about the moment you just left behind, or you can react to what’s happening in front of you. The moment is going to pass either way.
That’s how I try to think about the future. I don’t think there’s much value in stopping to ask whether the opportunities we had are gone forever or whether we’ll ever get those experiences again. We have to keep moving forward as though there will be another opportunity, because when it comes, we need to be ready to take it. There’s no real way to know what will happen, so I don’t want to spend my time mourning the past or convincing myself that the best moments are already behind us. You just keep moving, and when something comes along, you react.
There are definitely a lot of things I think could have been done better in the past. I just want to take what I’ve learned from those experiences and hopefully do it better this time. That’s really what this whole process has been about in a lot of ways: preserving what mattered, learning from what didn’t work, and making sure we’re prepared for whatever comes next.
There’s something about traveling somewhere because of a passion that makes those places feel more authentic, and sometimes almost magical. You’re seeing the world as it actually exists because you’re not necessarily experiencing it through a curated environment designed for tourists, but at the same time you’re not necessarily experiencing all of the negative aspects either, because you have a reason for being there. You’re there to play music, meet people, create something, or experience something that matters to you.
I don’t believe those moments are over, so I almost don’t allow myself to become nostalgic about them. I’d rather preserve them by honoring them and keeping that same movement and passion alive. Instead of looking back and wishing those experiences could happen again, I want to keep creating opportunities for them to continue happening.
FB: One thing we’ve always loved about the band is that nothing is obvious, even when it seems like it might be. What can you tell us about the title for the new record I WISH YOU WERE DOWN HERE WITH ME?
In a lot of ways, it’s just about losing someone. Looking at the slowest, darkest periods and the thoughts surrounding such a profound and traumatizing separation. There doesn’t always need to be a death to thoroughly mourn someone, especially when they’re leaving your life for good.
Despite a lot of the lyrics inevitably being my side of the events or feelings, I really enjoyed delving into the unreliable narrator concept, someone recounting these events through their own distorted perception of what happened. There’s also a lot of frustration, resistance, and even depravity in the way someone might react to the sudden removal of an assumed presence from the life they expected to have, whether that’s a person, a life, or simply a relationship.
Within that unreliable narrator concept, I explore the dynamic of someone desperately trying to keep another person in their life while inevitably pulling them deeper into their own hell. The most disturbing part is that they may not even recognize that they’re living within that space themselves. When you’re that deeply submerged in something, it can become impossible to distinguish between what you’re doing to survive and what you’re doing to the person beside you.
That also ties into the duality of both people trying to preserve some version of their relationship during a separation. Both parties can be attempting to keep each other in their lives in some capacity while simultaneously causing each other more damage. There’s something tragic about the ways we can drag the people we love through our own hell, often while believing that we’re acting out of love or good intentions.
There’s a strange contradiction in the way we care for the things we love: sometimes our desire to protect, preserve, or hold onto something can become the very thing that harms it. In that sense, the album also explores the uncomfortable idea that we can be deeply human in our intentions and still be incredibly destructive in our actions.
The title, I Wish You Were Down Here With Me, is meant to convey a lot of those ideas. It can almost be read as both an expression of longing and something much more sinister. It can mean, “I wish you were here because I miss you,” but it can also mean, “I’m trapped down here, and I want you to come down with me.” That ambiguity became an important part of what the title represents, especially within the unreliable narrator concept. The person saying it may genuinely believe they’re asking someone to come closer out of love, while simultaneously asking them to enter the same place that has already consumed them.
The phrase itself is honestly something I thought I had heard somewhere before, either in a movie or a video game. I looked through a few sources afterward but couldn’t find anything definitive, so I suppose I must have put it together subconsciously. I do remember certain lines and ideas from Dead Space and Silent Hill that touched on similar feelings of isolation, desperation, and wanting someone to descend into the same place you’re trapped in. Those ideas definitely resonated with the imagery surrounding the title, but the meaning it developed within the album became its own thing.
FB: How do you think the new record is going to surprise people?
In certain ways, I think it’s simply going to surprise people that it exists at all. They didn’t know it had been in production for all of this time, so I think there’s something inherently surprising about suddenly seeing such a massive amount of work and resources that have been poured into it.
In other ways, if the release is compared to BLACKOUT, which I don’t necessarily think is relevant at this point, it’s such a complete departure in terms of scope, production, writing style, ambition, and engineering. I do hope it’s surprising in the sense that we’re bringing things to the table that people never expected from us. I hope the risks we took with the album are appreciated, or at least translate in some way.
I really hope the scope of the album is perceptible. There’s so much happening in the arrangements, choirs, album duration, ensembles, song difficulty, dynamics, sound design, and all of these other details that went into making it. It really wasn’t made with the intent of being sold or making money. I genuinely just wanted to share one of the most challenging music projects I’ve ever been a part of with the world.
(Thanks for reading! If you’re looking for more music, check out our Bandcamp compilations here. If you like us, or possibly even love us, donations are always appreciated at the Buy Me A Coffee page here as well. Don’t let the bastards get you down!)