Listening to RIOT SON’s new single, “Loneliest at Best,” is a curious exercise in emotional time-travel. The sound pulls you back to the early 2000s, to a time of angular guitars and heartfelt, frayed-collar vocals. It has that nervous, shimmering energy of indie rock that always sounded best on a pair of wired headphones, the beat prodding you forward even as the lyrics confess to being hopelessly stuck. There’s a beautiful, raw-knuckle quality here, the kind that can only be forged in a home studio, where there’s no one to tell you an idea is too honest.
The whole affair is about being dressed for a party your heart has already left. This is the soundtrack to straightening your tie or reapplying lipstick in the rearview mirror while a silent, screaming match is still echoing in your head. It captures the profound awkwardness of a love that died not from a bang, but from a total, devastating system failure in communication.
That jangly post-punk guitar, it doesn’t just strum; it fidgets. It reminds me, bizarrely, of the sound a beautiful, antique telegraph machine might make if it were forced to send a modern text message—all frantic clicks and dashes, desperate to convey a complex emotion it simply wasn’t built for. And that, right there, is the track’s genius. It sonically replicates the very breakdown it describes: the inability to make the old language work for a new kind of pain.
RIOT SON has bottled the unique agony of knowing exactly what needs to be said, but possessing a tongue made of stone. The song doesn’t resolve, because the feeling doesn’t either. It just lingers. What, then, is the ghost of a conversation supposed to sound like?
