Every verse in “Nochmal” pairs a confession with a four-digit readout, like a hand rolling dice between admissions. “I’ve been here, I’ve been here before,” Antonia XM sings, then immediately: 1, 2, 3, 4. A few lines later, the sequence reverses, 4, 3, 2, 3, then scrambles again, 3, 4, 2, 1. The numbers climb, stall, and slide, tracking a board-game logic where forward motion never actually holds.
“Nochmal” is German for again, and that translation doubles as the song’s actual mechanism. Each time the numbers manage a real climb, three, four, five, six giving way to six, seven, eight, nine, they collapse right back down, nine, eight, six, five, five, four, three, one, until the song lands on the same admission it opened with, arriving back at the same starting point. The chorus operates as the rule of the game itself, spoken out loud eight times in a row. Repetition is the point.
Antonia XM built the track with longtime collaborator Kenji Araki, pairing goth-inflected guitar with a drumbeat that stays cold and mechanical under all that looping. It suits a Vienna and Berlin-based artist who’s spent two EPs, “DEMONS” and “blurry,” returning to the same recurring subjects, heartbreak and restlessness, with a producer’s precision. “Nochmal” previews her debut album by tightening that same instinct into a system: every attempt at progress gets fed back through the same four digits, over and over, until even burning it all down just produces more dust to sort through next time.
Eight rounds of “Nochmal” later, nothing about the game has changed. You just get to play it again.
B-Side Guys 
Leave a Reply