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Arswain Announces New Album I Thought It Was Perfect, Out April 10, 2026
Singles include “Care” (2/20/26), “Friend or Enemy” feat. Louis Cole (3/13/26), and “Crown Worn Down” (4/3/26)
Los Angeles–based artist Arswain returns in 2026 with I Thought It Was Perfect, a deeply personal, sonically ambitious album that confronts the emotional paradox at the heart of modern creative life: the joy of making something you love, and the quiet heartbreak of releasing it into a world that may or may not listen. Set for release on April 10, 2026, the album is Arswain’s most refined and revealing statement to date — an electronic record rooted as much in human vulnerability as in technical mastery.
LISTEN TO I THOUGHT IT WAS PERFECT
Arswain is the electronic alter ego of Freddy Avis, a composer and producer whose path to this moment has been anything but linear. Raised in Palo Alto, California, Avis’ musical instincts emerged early. By age six, he was already fronting a rock band with his brother, writing songs, singing lead, and performing with the intensity of a seasoned frontman. Those formative years were steeped in rock and metal — U2 and Coldplay alongside Mastodon, Nine Inch Nails, and Disturbed — laying the emotional groundwork for music that would always favor tension, catharsis, and release.
Technology entered Avis’ life just as early. At ten years old, he was handed a computer loaded with GarageBand, and production quickly became second nature. By middle school, he was recording and mixing his own material, developing a fluency in digital tools that would later define his career. As a teenager, his interests expanded into electronic music — Justice, Daft Punk, and the idea that rock songwriting could coexist with synthetic experimentation. But just as his musical identity was taking shape, another path intervened.
A standout baseball pitcher, Avis became a top prospect and accepted a scholarship to Stanford University, even being drafted by the Washington Nationals in 2012. Music took a back seat as athletics consumed his life — until a shoulder injury abruptly ended his playing career. The loss triggered a profound identity crisis. The future he had trained for vanished, and in its place was an open question: who was he without baseball?
The answer emerged in an unlikely place. Tucked away on Stanford’s campus was CCRMA — the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics — a hub for experimental sound and radical musical thinking. There, Avis rediscovered music not as competition or ambition, but as exploration. Surrounded by artists pushing the boundaries of electronic composition, he found community, inspiration, and eventually, a sound that felt like his own. It was during this period that Arswain was born, named after Avis’ great-great-great-great grandfather, the painter and architect R. Swain Gifford — a creative outlier in his family lineage whose legacy quietly resonated across generations.
That sense of being an outlier would continue to shape Arswain’s work. At Stanford, immersed in a culture obsessed with technology and entrepreneurship, Avis often felt alienated as someone drawn to art, emotion, and ambiguity. Electronic music became his bridge between those worlds: futuristic in texture, but grounded in feeling. That tension — between progress and humanity, ambition and doubt — runs directly through I Thought It Was Perfect.
After graduating, Avis moved to Los Angeles and entered the world of film and television scoring, first interning for Ramin Djawadi and then working for James S. Levine at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions. The experience sharpened his technical skills and taught him to work at relentless speed, contributing music across dozens of major projects alongside composers like James Newton Howard and Steve Jablonsky. But over time, the efficiency and anonymity of ghostwriting took its toll. Surrounded by other people’s visions, Avis began to lose touch with his own voice.
That reckoning led to Arswain’s 2020 debut album Partitioning, and later Lick From the Sink in 2023. When the latter failed to reach the audience he’d hoped for, Avis made a radical choice: he stopped writing altogether. Nearly a year passed in silence, marked by exhaustion, self-doubt, and a growing sense that the machinery of release cycles and streaming culture was draining the joy from creation itself.
The first crack in that silence became “Crown Worn Down” (the final single (to be released ahead of the album on April 3, 2026) and the first song written for I Thought It Was Perfect. Built around warm, tactile synthesizers played on hardware rather than software, the track captures the fragile moment when inspiration returns. Lyrically and emotionally, it confronts the fear that ideas—so alive in the studio — will wither once exposed to the outside world. It is a song about preemptive grief, creative burnout, and ultimately, permission to step away when the weight becomes too heavy.
If “Crown Worn Down” is introspective and tender, lead single “Care” (set to drop February 20, 2026), is its defiant twin. Stripping away overthinking and self-analysis, “Care” is a pure dance track — propulsive, playful, and unapologetically fun. Its message is simple and liberating: sometimes the only way forward is to let go. In the context of the album, it represents a refusal to let doubt dictate the act of making.
The album’s second single, “Friend or Enemy” (out March 13, 2026) captures Arswain at his most kinetic and unexpected, featuring drums by Louis Cole (Brainfeeder). The collaboration emerged out of tragedy, when Avis and Cole lost a close friend and musician in the LA music scene, Zach Moses Ostroff, to cancer in 2024. The track races forward at a manic tempo, brimming with the kind of exhilarating energy and fierce joy Zach brought to the music-making process. Cole’s live drums inject raw physicality into Arswain’s electronic framework, blurring the line between human performance and digital precision.
Across the full album, I Thought It Was Perfect unfolds as a meditation on expectation — of oneself, of art, and of the systems surrounding it. It wrestles with the seductive belief that the next project, the next release, the next idea will finally feel complete, only to confront the reality that perfection is always just out of reach. Rather than resolve that tension, Arswain sits inside it, finding beauty in the mess.
Ultimately, I Thought It Was Perfect is not an album about success or failure, but about persistence. It is the sound of an artist reclaiming joy from disillusionment, embracing imperfection as a creative truth, and choosing, again, to make something anyway.
I Thought It Was Perfect is out April 10, 2026.