B-Side Guys

Travel as escape only works if you’re not bringing yourself along. Blanket Approval’s “Berlin Blues” diagnoses a particularly modern malaise—the realization that physical movement doesn’t guarantee psychological progress, that you can bloom in Berlin and still feel nothing. The New York City four-piece, fresh off co-writing robot voices for Twenty One Pilots’ album Breach, turns their groovy indie rock approach toward examining what happens when wanderlust collides with the stubborn weight of unresolved internal baggage.

Drummer and singer Joey Hadden articulates the specific panic of sleepless travel, of backpacks making shoulders sore, of chest tightness that no amount of new scenery can relieve. The band’s indie dance elements keep the track moving even as the lyrics circle around stasis, creating a productive tension between groove and gridlock. Drummer/Singer Joey Hadden, bassist Max Mena (recruited after a collision at a Queens punk show), and Craigslist-sourced keyboardist/guitarist Rahul Chakraborty build a rhythmic foundation that refuses to let the song collapse into its own anxiety.

What makes the track resonate is its self-awareness about the trap of fashionable melancholy. There’s a moment of recognition where the narrator tries to shift perspective, to reframe drama as comedy, to think lighter thoughts—but the song structure keeps returning to those same refrains about lonely wheeling and inability to feel. The bridge’s image of lying alone with a phone, head reduced to nothing but a metronome, captures the strange emptiness of hyperconnected isolation perfectly.

The lyrics acknowledge centuries of history rumbling beneath railroad tracks while the narrator remains stuck in personal loops, unable to access anything beyond immediate discomfort. It’s a pointed contrast: all that accumulated human experience passing underneath while the mind stays trapped in repetitive patterns, wasting away on old things despite fresh locations. The third single from their new album, “Berlin Blues” suggests Blanket Approval understands that movement isn’t progress, that passion doesn’t automatically arrive with a passport stamp, and that sometimes the most honest thing you can do is admit you’re still stuck—just stuck somewhere more photogenic.