"Here (In Your Arms)"
A synth-pop love song from a Huntington Beach band that began as a way to woo crushes. "Here (In Your Arms)" climbed from Drive-Thru Records and MySpace to number 14 on the Hot 100 in early 2007, with a summer-camp video in which the campers play pogs.
Hellogoodbye started in 2001 as two Huntington Beach High School students, Forrest Kline and Jesse Kurvink, recording songs on Kline's home computer "to entertain friends and woo crushes." They posted them on MP3.com, played Orange County clubs, and signed to Drive-Thru Records in 2003. A self-titled EP in 2004 went on to sell more than 400,000 copies, MTV's Real World: Austin filmed them at South by Southwest in 2005, and that December they won MTV2's Dew Circuit Breakout. Kerrang! filed them under "Myspace band."
Kline wrote "Here (In Your Arms)" and Matt Mahaffey and Jeff Turzo produced it, but Drive-Thru didn't hear a single; the label let Kline make the call. It led the debut album, Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs!, released August 8, 2006. Critics reached for Cher and Daft Punk. About.com's Bill Lamb admitted there was "very little of a song here," just a simple idea stretched to four minutes, and was won over anyway; the BBC's Fraser McAlpine called it "a massive ball of sheer, unadulterated glee." Scott Culver's video, released July 26, 2006, is set at Camp Holadios — hola and adiós, a Spanish Hellogoodbye — where Kline chases a girl and the campers play pogs, with nods to Wet Hot American Summer.
The song took its time. It entered the Hot 100 at number 97, went to pop radio in November 2006, then caught a second wind in January 2007 and peaked at number 14, with a number-nine run on the Pop 100 and a platinum certification. Overseas it went bigger: number four in Britain after an April 2007 release, number two in Ireland, top ten in the Netherlands and Sweden. In 2007 the band headlined a tour with Boys Like Girls and co-headlined the MySpace Music Tour with Say Anything. BBC Radio 1's Chris Moyles gave it the ultimate British compliment, a parody called "Beer in Your Arms."
Kurvink left in 2008 to finish college, and a year-long lawsuit with Drive-Thru ended when the band walked in February 2010 and put out Would It Kill You? on its own Wasted Summer label that November. Hellogoodbye kept going as an indie act, releasing S'Only Natural in 2018 and touring the second album's tenth anniversary in 2021.
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