B-Side Guys

At first listen, “Drive Away” seems to capture a universal moment of youthful escape. But underneath Atomic Tom’s polished indie rock exterior lies a more complex narrative about the dissolution of certainty – a theme that parallels the band’s own tumultuous journey through the music industry’s promises and pitfalls.

The Brooklyn outfit’s bathtub-recorded anthem carries the grit of its DIY origins, even as its production gleams with the polish you’d expect from a group that once caught lightning in a bottle with an iPhone performance on the B Train. The song’s architecture feels intentionally nostalgic without falling into pastiche – no small feat for a band that cut their teeth during the height of New York’s early-2000s rock renaissance.

Lyrically, “Drive Away” operates on two distinct frequencies. The chorus (“We can drive all night and sleep through the day”) evokes the surface-level freedom of nocturnal adventure, but the verses reveal deeper fissures. “I thought we had this life all figured out / Seemed so easy back when we were young” lands like a punch to the gut, especially when followed by the admission “Now we got problems they don’t know about.”

The pre-chorus sections serve as emotional watersheds, with lines like “I can’t come back / When I’m breaking in half” providing necessary gravity to counterbalance the euphoric escape of the chorus. This tension between escape and confrontation drives the song’s emotional arc, creating a compelling dialectic between past optimism and present reality.

Most impressively, Atomic Tom manages to make their instrumental arrangement mirror this lyrical duality. The verse’s taut rhythms and angular guitar work suggest constraint and anxiety, while the chorus explodes into the kind of expansive sound that suggests empty highways and endless possibility. It’s smart arranging that serves the song’s narrative without drawing attention to its own cleverness.

The bridge section’s “Tell stories about fate / Just like we all used to” carries particular poignancy, suggesting that even nostalgia itself has become a form of escape. It’s a meta-commentary on the very impulse that drives people to romanticize their past – the same impulse that makes songs like this resonate so deeply.

What elevates “Drive Away” above similar entries in the genre is its refusal to fully commit to either celebration or lamentation. The song exists in the liminal space between youth and adulthood, between escapism and confrontation, between the DIY spirit of a Brooklyn apartment and the polished sound of a major label release.

For a band that once went viral with an iPhone performance on public transit, “Drive Away” proves Atomic Tom hasn’t lost touch with what made them compelling in the first place: the ability to capture complex emotional states within seemingly simple indie rock frameworks. As they gear up for their third LP in 2024, this track suggests they’re still finding new ways to navigate familiar territory.