Behind The Tracks: Arriver - Only On (Single) (2023)

"Only On" is a song about being out of options, facing a transformative choice to burn away their worldly attachments and embark on a voyage to manifest a new destiny. It's the fulcrum point in a psychedelic sci-fi novel we dreamed up. It's an odd one for us in that it's glacial and exposed, a moment in time. There's a lot going on in the spaces between notes. We recorded the bones of "Only On" together pre-pandemic but then it changed drastically as we all returned to it bit by bit, in isolation.

Arriver has always been a storytelling band. Our earlier records took historical narrative as a scaffold to organize our riffs and ideas into songs and albums...we'd pass around books to make the books we wanted to read, but as metal albums. This time we returned to fiction, picking up the thread of a character and story we created back at the beginning of the band (on Vanlandingham And Zone, which itself was based on some nonsense generated by a primitive AI.) It's inspired by things like Heavy Metal The Movie, comix by Alan Moore and Moebius, 70's SciFi, Ursula LeGuin... "Only On" is the point in the story where things get really weird. Then you flip the record over and explode into space.