Stay Young by North Arm

The Feature Album this week on 2SER is Stay Young by North Arm.

As a kid, North Arm’s Roderick Smith spent many family summers in a small town on the East Coast of New South Wales. After listening to Stay Young, you can kind of tell.

Memories of small-town holidays in your youth are a highly specific, though nonetheless universal experience. Though they may be the product of a distant past, time does little to erode the clarity of musings you might have on, say, that one holiday house you rented in some random town on some random weekend on some random Spring before you had even graduated primary school. 

For Smith, that random town was North Arm Cove, a riverside suburb just north of Newcastle. It was there that he spent much of his time strumming his guitar and listening, presumably, to a rotation of Elliot Smith, Wilco, and Sparklehorse. Though I can’t comment much on North Arm Cove itself (though it looks beautiful from Google Maps), I can say for certain that Stay Young is a quietly gorgeous record which so well articulates such a common yet elusive feeling. 

For the most part, Stay Young is a subdued affair, and the beauty of its compositions reveal themselves with repeated listens. The lo-fi recordings would keep you as warm as any campfire in winter, while Smith’s delicate voice recalls those artists he no doubt listened to during his many forays to North Arm Cove. It’s beneath the surface, however, that Stay Young truly flourishes, as gaps on the more sparse moments on the record are coloured in by expansive soundscapes. Take the title track as an example: Smith keeps the piece grounded, strumming a sleepy-yet-hypnotic acoustic riff over a soft melody, while shoegaze-adjacent tones hovers gently above in the background. It’s the sonic equivalent to watching a flying saucer cross a starlit sky while sitting on your balcony, joined only by a distant chorus of nocturnal animals (frogs, crickets, owls, etc). The same goes for instrumental track ‘Escapade’, an evocative interlude which showcases Smith’s knack for string composition. Celestial feels like an appropriate descriptor.

Stay Young is an ethereal piece of surf-folk that will no doubt find its home in the more quiet moments of otherwise busy lives. If ever you’ve got a spare second or two, take a seat on your balcony and hit play.

Words by Josh Ray

Stay Young is out now via Broken Stone Records on digital and CD.