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Jul 16, 2026 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Amelia Tabullo

The Blood Arm formed in Los Angeles amidst the explosion of 2000s dance punk and indie rock, eventually going on to release five full-length records before going on hiatus following their 2016 album, Kick ‘Em in the Sunglasses. The first chapter in that story came with the band’s self-released debut, Bomb Romantics, which arrived in 2004 as a limited physical run but was never released digitally.

However, in recent years the band got access to their back catalog and began revisiting old material. Tomorrow, The Blood Arm are re-releasing the full remastered album, which they’ve been teasing this year with a string of new singles from the album.

Singer Nathaniel Fregoso says, “After we got signed, we officially released four more albums, but we never forgot the first songs we wrote and recorded together. We finally got the rights back to our back catalogue and decided that we wanted these songs to finally see the light of day the way the rest of our music has. We had all of the tracks remastered and are now making them available on streaming services for the first time. Listening back, we love how much these songs hold up as a document of the time and our place in it, and we can’t wait to share the album with our fans.”

Today, they’re sharing an early listen to another of the record’s highlights, “World Class Traveler,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“World Class Traveler” acts as a time capsule of a particular moment in indie music’s history, recalling bands like The Strokes with its flinty garage rock guitar tone, Franz Ferdinand with Fregoso’s detached drawling vocals, or The Rapture’s pounding rhythms. All of these touchstones flow together in the track, but where they’re often deployed today as calcified reference points for an era or vibe, for a moment The Blood Arm was instead in conversation with those bands as contemporaries. The track captures the same nervy, frayed energy that animated much of 2000s garage rock, yet it isn’t just an exercise in indie sleaze nostalgia. It is a rollicking good time in its own right, given frantic, animated intensity by the hammering keys, jittery melodies, and expressive performances.

As Fregoso explains, “The lyrics to ‘World Class Traveler’ are really about me working at a post-production facility in Koreatown in LA and just being bored and frustrated, wanting to be a musician and tour the world and have this lifestyle that seems so unattainable. And it’s great that we actually attained it for a little while. But, I think it’s hard to write a song that’s sort of anti-capitalist and doesn’t sound kind of cringey. I wasn’t thinking about writing an anti-capitalist song, but it was. And I think that it’s still true that you can listen to it now and be like, don’t work so hard. And this whole trap, just when you’re about to unravel, I’ll tell you the benefits. I think we all felt stuck in our jobs and frustrated. Our rebellion then was, let’s all go be loud in our practice space together. At the time, we were practicing three to four nights a week. It was like a clubhouse for us. And then we’d get up the next morning and go to work all over again.”

Check out the song below. The Blood Arm’s remastered debut, Bomb Romantics, is out everywhere digitally for the first time on July 17th. The band will also be playing at Schokoladen in Berlin on September 30th, returning to the same stage as their last headlining show in 2016.