A Review of Chris Arthur’s New Album - ‘Underneath The Scar’
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
A rarity in music
An artist arrives at songwriting not through ambition or aspiration but through sheer necessity, the songs coming because not writing them was no longer an option.
Chris Arthur did not set out to make an album. He set out to survive the end of a relationship, and the songs poured out of him, in his own words, like he was bailing water out of himself so he would not drown. The fact that those songs are now Underneath The Scar, a debut album arriving August 6th and one of the most emotionally honest records you are likely to hear this year, is almost incidental to the reason they exist.
What makes the album remarkable is not just the songwriting but the conditions under which it was made. Arthur sent voice memo recordings of early ideas to a small number of close friends. One of those friends, Eric Sanderson, co-founder and multi-instrumentalist of acclaimed New York band Augustines, became very interested indeed. Their friendship stretches back more than twenty-five years, Arthur having managed tours for Sanderson’s former band Pela before working alongside Augustines through much of the band’s rise between 2011 and 2016, and appearing in the award-winning documentary Rise: The Story of Augustines. That history of mutual trust gave the recording its defining quality.
“Eric believed in what I was doing before I fully believed in myself,” Arthur says. “I was broken, dealing with lots of self-doubt and now was adding imposter syndrome into the mix and questioning whether I was wasting everyone’s time. His encouragement and my comfort level with him really provided me the space to be in such a raw and vulnerable state. This album probably doesn’t get made without him.”
The result is built around acoustic-driven songwriting and organic performances, deliberately prioritising emotional honesty over production perfection. Arthur made the decision to preserve the order in which the songs were written, so the album functions as an emotional timeline: beginning with the collapse, moving through grief and reflection and resilience, arriving finally at something that tentatively resembles hope. Ten songs. A complete story. A reminder that in an era of playlists and short-form content, albums can still tell the kind of truth that takes time to reach.
Underneath The Scar is not a perfect record and it was never meant to be. It is a true one, which is considerably more difficult to achieve and considerably more valuable.
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