I have a theory that the best repetitive songs are really about someone trying to leave a room and failing. ‘right now’, the newest single from Seattle’s arms around the world, is a prime example. It circles and circles, and every lap reveals a little more about whoever’s doing the running.
The track feels like a washing machine tumbling at full spin, a drum of light and noise in constant motion. The guitar is the loud thing in the drum, all rust and bruised metal, the sound of an old instrument that has seen things and wants you to know it. It pushes forward like a crowd moving towards an exit, and I mean that as praise. There’s real physical urgency here, a pressure in the chest that arrives before the brain has caught up.
What makes it special is how much tenderness gets smuggled in. Jon Rimmerman sings with a kind of weary hush, as if he’s confessing something to the ceiling, harmonies drift in like steam off a cup of tea left too long on the sill. Everything wants to be bigger, faster, more, yet the voices keep gently suggesting that you could just stop and be held for a minute. The song never takes the offer, and that’s what gives it its ache. It’s a beautiful argument between appetite and rest, and it ends with neither side winning.
Second album, ‘connection’, arrives in January 2027, and on the strength of this I’d happily sit in the noise a while longer.
Listen to ‘right now’ here.
