B-Side Guys

There’s a trumpet in “Candy Apple,” and it’s doing a lot of work. The Texas bedroom producer known as Armadillo built this track around an upbeat Pharrell-and-Rex-Orange-County-inflected production, and the trumpet is the thing that tips the emotional register from sad-but-danceable into something with a little more nerve. You can’t be too defeated when there’s a trumpet involved.

The lyric doesn’t hide what’s underneath the brightness. “Guess I been thinking too much” opens the first verse before things spiral through a glass, lost class, spirits falling, someone lying in bed defeated. The chorus pivots to encouragement, “keep that head high, keep that head on tight,” but the encouragement sounds like something the narrator is giving to themselves as much as anyone else. The room is spinning. People are smiling, maybe shining. The “maybe” is doing real work there.

The second verse is the song’s most exposed stretch: dreaming of colder late nights, wanting something that feels right, hoping someone will tell them they’re worth it in the morning. The production keeps moving forward regardless, which is the point. Armadillo described wanting something chill enough to dance to despite the sadder lyrics, and the track delivers on that without ironing out the tension between them.

“Just to feel anyway” closes the chorus each time, and it’s the line that quietly says what the song is actually about: the attempt to feel something real inside a life that keeps spinning slightly out of reach. The candy apple is bright and sweet on the outside. The trumpet plays on.