B-Side Guys

A warning shot isn’t aimed to kill. It’s aimed to be heard. Jordan Tariff’s debut single, the opening release from his upcoming project Archives, carries that same energy: not a wound, but a signal that something has shifted and he’s done pretending otherwise.

Tariff spent years unable to release music, pouring himself into an industry that returned the favor with silence, and “Warning Shot” processes that reckoning through moody, expansive dream pop that makes grievance feel earned rather than indulgent. The production is epic in scale but never loses the personal thread running underneath it.

The lyrics sit at the intersection of disillusionment and self-awareness. “You sacrifice those moments in a wave / pen and paper mark an invisible page” captures the specific futility of creative labor that disappears without a trace, work done and lost, time spent and unacknowledged. The second verse lands hardest not in its biggest moment but its quietest: ‘the things I wish that I had never known’ dropped mid-verse, almost offhand, the way that kind of knowledge actually accumulates.

The chorus, “falling for the stars / coming up short again,” with its admission that “it’s so naive of us to think we’d ever make it far,” could easily read as resignation. As a warning shot, though, it reads differently. You don’t fire one unless you’re still standing. The title reframes everything beneath it, and that reframing is doing more work here than any single lyric.