Anxiety

Before a single word is sung, the song makes you uncomfortable. A thin, high tone sits in the air for about a minute, a little longer than feels polite, and you start to wait for it to resolve.^[1] It doesn't. That patient, slightly unbearable opening is the most honest description of anxiety the band could have devised, and it sets the terms for everything that follows on the first track of Preoccupations' self-titled second album.

One critic called the drone an accurate musical rendition of the condition, and it is hard to argue.^[1] Another heard an inescapable, stalking whine of feedback that eventually breaks open into all-encompassing gloom.^[4] The song doesn't describe a panic attack so much as put you inside the low hum that precedes one.

A band between names and homes

The context matters here. The group began life as Viet Cong, a name that drew criticism and eventually protests, and they decided to abandon it. The new name, Preoccupations, was announced in April 2016, a few months before the album arrived on September 16 of that year.^[3][5] The record was made with Graham Walsh as producer, over a longer stretch of time than the debut had been given.^[3][5]

The lineup was singer and bassist Matt Flegel, guitarists Scott Munro and Daniel Christiansen, and drummer Mike Wallace.^[3] Flegel and Wallace had already survived the end of an earlier band, and the shadow of that history hangs over everything the group has done since.

Behind the rebrand lay something more personal. Munro told The Skinny that he and Flegel had both watched long-term relationships collapse over the previous year, and that the band had put its belongings into storage and lived a transient life, with no real home base while the record took shape.^[3] He also said the lyrics turned out darker in places than he expected.^[3] That is the soil from which an opening track named after a mental state grows.

Change, in this reading, is not liberation but vertigo: the ground you stood on has been sold, stored, or renamed, and your nervous system hasn't caught up. A band forced to drop its name has to answer a question most people only face in a crisis, namely who you are once the label is gone.

How the sound builds the feeling

After the drone comes a steady beat and a simple two-note bassline, its edges softened by a slight decay, with Flegel's voice sitting in a very low, rumbling register.^[1] The arrangement is restrained. Nothing flails. That restraint is part of the point, because anxiety in daily life rarely looks like a scream. It looks like a person functioning, mostly, while something loud and thin whirs underneath.

Critics placed the band in a gothic post-punk lineage of dark, greyscale textures.^[1] Munro said the record contains some major-key material and more electronics than the debut, which makes it a touch lighter in sound than its predecessor, even if reviewers still heard darkness everywhere.^[3] The chorus is the clearest case. One writer called it among the most hypnotic and gorgeous passages on the whole nine-song album, arriving after a start that is very dark indeed.^[2] The beauty is not a contradiction. It is how the dread feels from inside: strangely absorbing, almost seductive, hard to look away from.

It helps to remember how much of the record's weight sits in its arrangements. The group has always used repetition as a pressure tactic, and here the repetition is gentler but no less insistent. The same small figures return again and again, so that the listener feels the loop before understanding it. A mind caught in worry works the same way, replaying one scene until it wears a groove.

What the words circle around

The lyrics avoid the tidy case study. Douglas Martin, writing for Passion of the Weiss, observed that they don't walk through one person's affliction in a clinical way. Instead they stack up unsettling sensations: bad dreams, a feeling of being hemmed in, the habit of second-guessing every small detail, and a jaded craving for something astonishing enough to break the numbness.^[1] The song evokes the condition rather than explaining it.

That approach explains why the track lands for listeners with very different stories. There is no named cause to argue with. The opening gesture is about uncertainty and unease, a mind that cannot let any detail rest.^[2] Many people who live with anxiety recognize that loop precisely because it attaches itself to nothing in particular and everything at once.

The imagery also carries a restless boredom alongside the fear. Wanting something to astonish you while dreading what comes next is a very particular double bind, and the song holds both impulses at once without resolving them.

A breakup hiding in plain sight

There is a wrinkle that makes the song more intimate than its abstraction suggests. Flegel told Flood that he did not realize at the time of writing that the lyrics were about a breakup. It only became clear to him when he wrote them out for a journalist weeks before the interview.^[2]

This is a familiar creative pattern: the unconscious gets to the subject first and the conscious mind arrives late. A relationship ending is, among other things, a machine for producing anxiety, with its sleepless rehearsals, its second-guessing, its sudden claustrophobia in a shared space or an empty one. Hearing the song as a breakup record does not shrink it. It gives the free-floating dread a source, even if the singer himself didn't see it at first.

Flegel has described writing as a release, a way to get through these things, and said the new name gave the band a clean slate of sorts.^[2] Munro put it more vividly, saying it was like being reborn.^[2] Taken together, those comments suggest that placing this song first was a statement about where the band was standing: at the bottom of a transition, naming the fear before trying to climb out of it.

One word, one chapter

The track belongs to a set of single-word titles, including Degraded, Monotony, Stimulation, and Fever. Munro explained the band made a conscious choice to try to encapsulate what was going on in each track in one word.^[3] That choice turns the album into something like a clinical chart of a rough year, each entry a symptom or a state.

Placed first, Anxiety works like a diagnosis given before the examination begins. The longer pieces that follow, including the eleven-minute centerpiece Memory, take the same unease and stretch it into larger questions about identity and mortality.^[5] Critics at the time read the whole record as bleak, anxious, and preoccupied with confusion and depression, and the opener is where that reading starts.^[4][5]

Why it resonates

Plenty of songs name anxiety and then explain it. This one skips the explanation and lets you sit in the sensation, which is arguably more useful to someone who has felt it. There is relief in hearing a mood you couldn't articulate rendered accurately, even when the rendering is unpleasant.

It also arrived at a cultural moment when conversations about mental health were becoming more open, and when post-punk revival bands were increasingly willing to treat inner states, not just social anger, as their subject. The track sits comfortably in that tradition, where a bass and a drum machine feel can say more about a nervous system than a confessional verse.

For a listener, the practical gift is company. Anxiety is isolating because it feels private and irrational, and a song that gives the feeling a shape tells you that other people have stood in the same room. That the band made it during a year of lost homes and ended relationships lends the track a credibility that a more polished treatment would lack.^[3]

The song's staying power comes from its refusal to flatter either the listener or the condition. It is neither a triumphant recovery narrative nor a self-pitying wallow. It is a clear look at a state that most people spend a lot of energy hiding.

Other ways to hear it

If you take the breakup reading as the key, the song becomes a portrait of the first weeks after a partnership ends, when ordinary routines turn strange and nights stretch out. If you lean on the band's biography, it becomes a document of displacement, the sound of four musicians with their belongings in storage and their old identity retired.^[3]

A third reading ignores biography altogether and treats the track as pure phenomenology, a study of how an anxious mind processes the world. Martin's comment that the song is not particularly anxious in tone, even as it renders the condition, points toward that view: the performance is composed and controlled, a portrait made at a careful distance.^[1] All three readings fit, and the song seems built to allow them.

Where it leaves you

By the end, the tension has not been cured. It has been shaped into something you can hold, a groove with a hum in it. That may be the most accurate thing a song about anxiety can do. It doesn't promise that the whine will stop. It suggests that the whine, set to a steady beat and a bassline, can be endured, and even found beautiful, long enough to get to the next track.