Listening to The Trusted’s new single, “Levitate,” is to willingly submit to a glorious, well-produced panic attack. From its opening moments, where frontman Tom Cunningham confesses to feeling like something to be discarded in the street, the track establishes a brutal vulnerability before yanking you into the dizzying orbit of another human being. It’s the sound of being so completely poleaxed by infatuation that your own center of gravity ceases to exist.
The song fixates on a pair of eyes with the same intensity as one of those infuriating 3D stereogram posters from my childhood. You’d stare, unfocusing your vision until the world dissolved into a fuzzy, hypnotic pattern, hoping for a shark or a spaceship to emerge from the chaos. Here, the lush guitars and layers of synth create that same disorienting blur, a sonic vertigo where the only point of focus is the subject of obsession. This is surrender. The track doesn’t fight the feeling; it leans into the gleeful freefall.
Structurally, the whole thing is built for velocity. The sharp percussion pushes forward relentlessly, driving toward a chorus that’s a supernova of hooks designed to be screamed across a festival field. It’s a huge, cinematic explosion of pure feeling, but what’s most captivating is the anxious hum thrumming just beneath the euphoria. It acknowledges the loss of control as both terrifying and utterly desirable, a state of suspended animation where bliss is indistinguishable from delusion.
For all its soaring altitude and romantic ambition, the track ends on the quiet shiver of two words: “never certain.” After all that euphoric chaos, what happens when you eventually look down?
