Brooklynite Todd Goldstien seemed completely surprised when congratulated on the release of his album Kids Aflame in Australia this month. “What? Really? I had no idea, that’s great,” he enthuses. “I hadn’t really thought beyond my own country and now it’s coming out in countries that I’ve never even been.”

Better known as Arms, one-man band Goldstein started playing music at age eight. Enrolled in piano lessons at the urging of his parents, he dabbled in the saxophone until he reached 13, when he played his first guitar. He began exploring his songwriting after high school, adding vocals to his expanding list of talents before setting off in search of greener musical pastures.

Moving from Providence to Brooklyn in 2004, Goldstein had one thing on his mind: music. He was creatively attuned with the spazzy, power pop that was already floating through the airwaves, but rather than feeling inspired, Goldstein struggled throughout his first year in the Big Apple. He couldn’t write a note, soon discovering that New York was a hell of a town. “I had a lot of personal unrest at the time,” he reflects. “It’s kind of hard to write when you’re not feeling great. New York is a very stressful place, there is a lot of pressure to be something, or do something important, and I think I kind of let that get to me a lot.”

The changing skyline, atmosphere and scene, coupled with his changing emotional state, saw Goldstein enter a new musical junction. “I was listening to stuff I hadn’t listened to before and music was hitting me in a way that it had never really hit me before. I started listening to noise and terrible, terrible sounding, very abrasive, difficult music. It was a lot of sadder, weirder, darker stuff. It was a sadder, weirder, darker time.”

A year after arriving in Brooklyn, Goldstein found his artistic stride again, but what he heard himself creating was nothing like anything he had ever done before. “Once I started writing again, it was a lot denser and more straight-forwardly presented and it kind of cruised along. I thought, well this is new, it needs a new name. And that’s when I became Arms.”

Once he had created the Arms character, Goldstein threw his music onto MySpace for the World Wide Web to hear. He was soon contacted by Modular who promptly signed him to their UK label. Arms’ debut album Kids Aflame is the culmination of the last four years work. “People refer to it as an album but really it’s the cobbling together of the best songs from those first couple of years of writing as Arms,” he says. “I think a lot of people’s albums work out that way, where it’s really sort of your favourite songs that you’ve written over the past couple of years.”

Recorded in home studios, basements and bedrooms, Kids Aflame comes at you like a paper freight train; both fragile and domineering, winding its way through a New York story. The raw, under-produced feel of his debut album came about as a conscious decision. “I decided for the first one I’m going to make the best, shitty sounding lo-fi record I possibly can. Then for the next record I’m going to ask the label very nicely to give me a studio and a producer and to do a real super professional rock and roll album.”

As well as performing as Arms, Goldstein plays in two side projects: The Sea and The Gulls, a loosely improvised partnering with friend Leah Beeferman, and the hotly-tipped Harlem Shakes. These polar opposite projects shape the way Goldstein’s solo offering is approached. “Because Harlem Shakes is very meticulous and very carefully put together, things are arranged. Every note of every song is placed by the band as a unit and I think that that’s influenced how I deal with Arms now. Playing with other people, playing instruments is like the biggest source of joy in my life. I just like playing in bands period. So that’s where I’m always happy.”

And while he loves the collaborative nature of creating music with like-minded musicians, he says that he will always approach songwriting alone. “Songwriting is something that I guard very, very carefully. It’s a very, very difficult experience for me to write songs. Not because I’m venting so many difficult emotions but because I find the process of coming up with a song I like so hard, and so frustrating.

“With my own Arms band I sit by myself and I agonise and I frustrate and I feel terrible and I poop out a song. Then I bring it to other people and we play it, and we have a good time and then everything is awesome.”

Looking towards the future, Goldstein is set to be as busy as a beaver with his three projects, a promised tour of Australia and his continuing work on a sophomore album; a record that will see him explore the Arms character. “The stuff that I’ve written already is a lot more ambitious song-writing wise; a lot more complicated and veers a lot farther into a darker moodier territory. The songs are a lot more like scary stories.”

Arms’ Kids Aflame is out 6 September on Melodic through Inertia. To download a free mp3 of Arms’ track Kids Aflame, simply CLICK HERE.