Isaiah “Kit” Carson is one of the DIY musicians who helped make fifth-wave emo a subcultural phenomenon in the late 2010s. He’s the founding drummer in a mathy, whimsical Tennessee band called Guitar Fight From Fooly Cooly, which formed in 2018, and he’s made offstage contributions too. In early 2020, he launched the microlabel Sun Eater Records and recruited bands he knew to build its roster. Within months, he’d released cassettes by two of the scene’s biggest acts: Long Island’s Oolong and New Jersey’s Ogbert the Nerd. But the most significant release in Sun Eater’s first year was by Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Tyler Odom. He makes inventive screamo under the name Your Arms Are My Cocoon, but Carson had never met him—and Odom had never performed YAAMC’s music outside his bedroom.
“That dude just came out of nowhere,” Carson says. “Just completely shocking.” He hadn’t even heard Your Arms Are My Cocoon until Odom sent him the project’s unreleased self-titled debut EP through the contact page on Sun Eater’s Limited Run site. Carson was bombarded with demos, and he says most of them came from teenagers just discovering music. “A lot of them play a G chord on an acoustic guitar and scream about crying or something,” he says. “Which is fine. I encourage it.” When he saw that YAAMC used the kind of silly, wordy song titles that had long been a cliche in emo (“Clifford the Big Red Stab Wound”), he expected more of the same.
When Carson clicked “play,” though, he heard something completely new to him. Odom’s music fused the lo-fi comforts of bedroom pop with the spiky, unpredictable aggression of screamo—sighing accordion and wisps of xylophone jostled with knotty, rapid-fire guitar runs, clusters of electronic percussion, and hoarse screams. Carson remembers being won over by the looping curlicue guitar and four-on-the-floor bass drum of “Snowy!”
“I could tell,” Carson says, “whether or not everyone likes it, this is the type of music that only this person could make.”
On September 2, 2020, Sun Eater issued the Your Arms Are My Cocoon EP in an edition of 50 black-splattered pink cassettes. They sold out within a day. “The first couple of months of the EP being out were really interesting,” Odom says. “For the first time in my life, people were paying attention to what I was making.”
Your Arms Are My Cocoon all but created a new subgenre with this self-titled EP.
Odom could never have predicted the impact his music would have. By combining bedroom pop with the rough-and-tumble version of screamo colloquially known as skramz, he helped birth a subculture within fifth-wave emo called “bedroom skramz.” That tag proliferated on Bandcamp—a hothouse for independent home-recorded music and marginal microgenres—and in February 2022, Bandcamp Daily published a report by Jude Noel on the emergence of a wider bedroom skramz phenomenon.
Since the initial explosion of bedroom skramz in late 2020, it’s evolved in several wildly different directions thanks to the likes of Texas-Oklahoma postrock four-piece Dead Butterflies, rootsy Nashville project So Long . . . Partner, and chiptune-tinged multinational ensemble Gingerbee. Odom’s innovation thrust Your Arms Are My Cocoon into the firmament of fifth-wave emo, itself a loose movement united by little but a drive to remake the genre. In July 2022, when the Ringer published “The Most Important Emo Song of Every Year,” it gave the YAAMC track “In October of 2019 I Called a Suicide Hotline for the First Time in My Life” the honor for 2020. In that piece, Arielle Gordon wrote, “Your Arms Are My Cocoon, the solo project of Tyler Odom, feels as close as anything to a definitive marker of the movement, a band to hold others up against to see if they fit the ethos of the Fifth Wave.”
Weatherday, Your Arms Are My Cocoon, Summer 2000, Sweet Bike
Sun 3/16, 6:30 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $22, $20 in advance, all ages
Chicago multi-instrumentalist James McHenry, who makes discombobulating cybergrind as Blind Equation, was reminded of Indiana screamo band Merchant Ships when he first heard Your Arms Are My Cocoon. They’d existed for just a couple years in the late 2000s, but their volcanic outbursts made a big impression on him. “Your Arms Are My Cocoon’s EP was the closest that anything I’ve listened to had gotten to [Merchant Ships]—that display of raw emotion, and the production being so bare-bones,” McHenry says. “Another thing I really loved was all of the layers of instrumentation within the recordings—you hear all the bells and various different instruments. When I learned later on that it was all recorded on an iPhone, that fuckin’ blew my mind.”
Blind Equation and Your Arms Are My Cocoon both began as home-recording projects and evolved into live bands, and in spring 2024 they toured together for a month in southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Your Arms Are My Cocoon played as a four-piece, a configuration Odom had debuted roughly a year before. At the time of that tour, the only music YAAMC had put out since the 2020 EP had been an expanded reissue and contributions to two split releases. But Odom had already recorded a couple songs for the project’s full-length debut, where he wanted to make a clean break from the EP. That album, released in August 2024 as Death of a Rabbit, would draw on his new full-band sound.
YAAMC had started playing full-band shows before the recording of Death of a Rabbit, but it’s still largely a one-person effort.
“I didn’t want to write more of what the EP was, because I had already done the EP,” Odom says. “I had already made the songs, and I had already fulfilled that vision. It didn’t make sense to me to do more of it. So I knew I wanted it to be bigger. I knew I wanted it to be grander in scope.”
Except for the drums, Odom played nearly everything himself on Death of a Rabbit, but its wide-screen sound feels like the output of a huge band. The album is a big shift, but a big shift was inevitable for a project Odom didn’t expect to have a second release.
“It was never the project’s intention to get to where it is now,” he says. “The project’s intention was to be released, and to be listened to by nobody, and then to be forgotten about.”
The idea for bedroom skramz took hold of Odom in 2018 and 2019. As a teenager living in the Houston suburb of Katy, Odom devoted most of his listening time to bedroom pop and screamo. As he fell asleep at night, his drifting mind would fuse them into a single sound.
None of his friends at the time shared his love of screamo. Odom himself hadn’t known what to make of it when he first encountered it in elementary school. He’d belatedly heard a 2006 Eyeball Records sampler that came packaged with copies of My Chemical Romance’s 2002 album, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love. Screamo-adjacent New Jersey band the Number Twelve Looks Like You appeared on the comp.
“At first I fuckin’ hated it—I thought it was terrible,” Odom says. “I was like, ‘Why the fuck are they screaming in my ear? Jesus.’ But I kept coming back to it, and eventually I became obsessed with it.”
In middle school and high school, Odom focused most of his creativity on theater. But in 2016, still several years from graduation, he saw UK math-rock band TTNG play in Houston and bought their book of guitar tablature. “I spent the entire summer doing nothing every single day except for learning their songs,” Odom says. He practiced for three to eight hours daily. “That was the first time I had picked up a guitar.”
Odom made mostly folk and bedroom pop in his first ventures into writing and recording music, inspired by hushed Philadelphia project Dandelion Hands and florid Los Angeles-via-Boston outfit Bedbug. “I loved how intimate and personal bedroom pop sounded,” Odom says. “It can feel so close, personally, but also nostalgic at the same time. It feels like music from a personal past, even if that’s not the kind of music that you listened to in your past.”
By that point, Odom also loved screamo, and he could hear bedroom pop’s expressions of vulnerability echoed in its much more confrontational songs. The idea to combine them felt so right that he couldn’t let it disappear into his dreams. He couldn’t find anyone nearby who wanted to play screamo, but bedroom pop had already shown him he could make music on his own—he just had to figure out how to fuse a quiet genre with a loud one.
The first bedroom skramz song Odom wrote was “Snowy!,” the last track on the 2020 EP. “I wrote it as a one-off,” he says. “I used everything I knew from practicing writing bedroom-pop songs, and I just put that into a song and screamed over it. I thought that was gonna be it. I left it to be its own thing for about a year, until I realized I wanted to make more things in that style.”
Odom began writing increasingly complex songs and adapted them for a variety of instruments. “A lot of the arrangements on the songs aren’t just guitar, bass, and programmed drums,” he says. “It’s also accordion, violin, or xylophone. I felt like there was so much space that was left empty that needed to be filled.”
Except for some of the vocals, Odom recorded the EP in his literal bedroom. “I still lived with my parents, and I didn’t want them to hear me screaming,” he says. “So I would wait until they were out on a walk or something to record vocals. If I was really in a pinch—I really just wanted to get some stuff down—I would go into my car in the parking lot of my high school, either right after school or in between classes, and record vocals there.”
Odom finished the EP in August 2020, the same month he moved from Katy to Chicago. He was drawn here by the improv comedy scene, and he enrolled at Columbia College. He still hasn’t tried his hand at improv here, and he quit Columbia after three months. “I wanted to stay in Chicago, even after I dropped out,” he says. “I knew that if music was what I wanted to do, then there was going to be a better scene in Chicago—and a better opportunity for me in Chicago to pursue that—than in small-town Texas.”
Your Arms Are My Cocoon steadily grew a cult fan base online, but Odom had trouble getting settled in Chicago. He ran out of cash shortly after dropping out of school, and he says he spent six months sleeping on a stranger’s couch with nowhere else to go. He finally began to feel settled in early 2022. “That’s when I started committing to the idea of Your Arms Are My Cocoon live shows,” Odom says.
Odom has never had a manager or publicist, so in summer 2020, as Sun Eater prepared to release the Your Arms Are My Cocoon EP, Carson gave him advice about using social media to get his music out to the world. After he began playing solo shows as Your Arms Are My Cocoon in early 2022, social media helped him put together a band.
“The first tour I did as a solo artist, playing with backing tracks and stuff, I knew that I wanted a full band,” Odom says. “I hated the way that the backing tracks sounded, and I hated the way the live sets as a whole sounded.” He recruited musicians through Twitter and Instagram, and they spent a few months rehearsing so they could play YAACM’s songs with no backing tracks at all. The full four-piece band debuted at Bookclub’s defunct DIY space in April 2023. “Playing the music that I had written a couple years prior, with three other people helping fill out the sound—it felt so incredible,” Odom says. “It’s something that I will never, ever forget.”
Odom plays backed by bassist Dom Baylock, saxophonist Alyssa Mandel, and drummer Naser Mansour, all of whom he now counts among his best friends. Working with the band helped him beat the writer’s block that had plagued him since he dropped YAAMC. When Odom and his band arrived in Southeast Asia last spring, he’d written nearly half of Death of a Rabbit.
Odom recorded the album’s vocals anywhere he could—a DIY recording studio, his Pilsen apartment, his car. “There were a couple of vocal takes that I even recorded when we were touring Asia—at the venue in Hong Kong,” he says. “But I scrapped [them] ’cause it sounded like shit in there.”
Death of a Rabbit is just as frenziedly eclectic as anything Odom has recorded, but the album has outgrown bedroom skramz. As radical as the genre was at its inception, it suffers from an excess of artists trying to recapture the feel of its foundational recordings—including the Your Arms Are My Cocoon EP. That’s something Odom expressly doesn’t want to do. “Runner Duck,” from the new album, runs more than ten minutes—more than half the length of the entire EP. Its grandiose changes befit a prog song, and the whole album has a vibrant richness that doesn’t sound like it could be contained by anybody’s childhood bedroom.
Odom is still blazing a trail, and he’s following it further and further away from where he started. “Your Arms Are My Cocoon is not a one-trick pony,” he says. “It’s going to continue to evolve and continue to sound different than anything else you’ve ever heard, because that’s what I want to do. I want to make music that I haven’t heard before.”
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