Sometimes the songs arrive because you want them to. Sometimes they arrive because you absolutely need them to. For Chris Arthur, it was the latter. After the collapse of a relationship, the Buffalo-born, Southern California-based songwriter found himself in survival mode, reaching for music as a way to process the wreckage. The songs came quickly, almost urgently, and before there was any thought of an album, Arthur was sending rough voice memos to a handful of close friends.
One of those friends was Eric Sanderson, co-founder and multi-instrumentalist of acclaimed New York band Augustines. Sanderson heard something in those early recordings and became a key force in turning Arthur’s private songwriting into Underneath The Scar, his debut album, arriving August 6, 2026. Produced, recorded and mixed by Sanderson, the record follows Arthur through heartbreak, grief, self-doubt and the difficult process of finding his way back to himself.
The connection between the pair runs deep. Arthur’s friendship with Sanderson stretches back more than 25 years, beginning with his time as Tour Manager for Sanderson’s former band Pela. He later worked alongside Augustines in various capacities during much of the band’s rise between 2011 and 2016, and appeared in Todd Howe’s award-winning documentary Rise: The Story of Augustines. When Arthur began questioning whether he belonged in the studio at all, Sanderson was there to push back against those doubts.
“Eric believed in what I was doing before I fully believed in myself,” Arthur says. That belief gave Arthur the space to be brutally honest. He describes the songs arriving “like I was bailing water out of me so I wouldn’t drown,” and rather than sanding away their rough edges, he preserved their original sequence. Beginning with “All That Glitters Isn’t Gold,” the album moves through the emotional wreckage of a relationship before slowly finding resilience and hope.
At its core, Underneath The Scar is about what happens when pain becomes impossible to keep bottled up. Built around acoustic-driven songwriting and organic performances, the album is less interested in perfection than connection. Arthur may have spent years standing just outside the spotlight, but with this debut he finally steps through it, carrying ten songs that began as a way to survive and became something far more universal.