B-Side Guys

The metaphor pulls double duty, and the band knows it. Trees as something organic and rooted, but also as the cold logic of nodes and branches that determine what you hear, what you read, who you become. “Lost in the Branches” opens in the first register, a boy climbing through green limbs trying to catch a glimpse of an expanding scene, enchanted and suspended off the ground. By the second verse, it’s slipped into the second: the algorithm is now the tree, and the view from up there is lonelier and less legible than it looked from below.

The Lives of Famous Men have been at this since 2007, working with producers including Paul Q Kolderie, whose credits include Radiohead, and landing spots on Jimmy Kimmel Live along the way. That experience shows in how precisely the song’s construction mirrors its argument. Frontman Daniel Hall and the band layered synths, sidechained the drums, and processed the guitars into something ethereal, which means a song mourning algorithmic culture was built using the tools of it. The discomfort that it creates is presumably intentional.

“What happened to the boy you wooed? / It seems he’s half himself” is the sharpest turn, ambition that’s lost its object, identity eroded by the same systems that were supposed to amplify it. The shift from “enchanted” to “disenchanted” across the two choruses is simple on paper and quietly devastating in practice. He’s not angry up there in the branches. He just can’t figure out how to get down, which is a different and more honest problem.

The song is featured on End Times Elevator Music, due April 24, 2026, which, from everything previewed, appears to be an album that’s earned its title.