Song Review:: Catch the Young: In Your Arms

• Release date: 2025 September 28

• Album tracklist: In Your Arms, In Your Arms (inst.)

• Album runtime: 8 minutes

 Well, my boys have dropped another single. I saw the preview for it and it sounds really good, so I'm excited to hear the song in full. These guys are a band who are coming up on their second anniversary in a couple of months and I highly recommend you look up their covers because they're quite impressive. And if you want to hear something funny, they're the bare minimum for not being on Underage Protocol because the maknae turned sixteen the day they debuted. The others were all in their twenties already, so at that point, I'm comfortable with my expectation that they can protect him from the icks of the entertainment industry, which is gross no matter the country. Also, fun fact, one of them was an idol trainee who dropped out because he doesn't like to dance that much. I laughed a little when I learned that. And moving back to the subject of this specific song, it's almost four minutes of song. Y'all.

Bless them for giving us the instrumental on its own. This is such a soft song, and I love that I can hear what the vocal melody is going to sound like, and it's not even really relegated to the keyboard doing all of that work. It does do a lot of that work, but the guitar gets plenty of time to shine with melody rather than only the keyboard getting fun movements. So there are basically three types of instrumentals (this is largely reductionist, but I know I tend to go on long tangents so if you'll excuse me for the reductionism here, I'll try to avoid one here) that we hear in music with vocals: instrumentals that are the star, instrumentals that support the vocals, and instrumentals that tell their own story alongside the lyrics. I don't understand the first kind, but luckily it's pretty rare. The second is what I expect, although it's not my favorite. But it's the third kind that always catches my attention because that's what I'm always looking for, where we get personality and emotional movement within the song rather than the attempted manipulation of the listener's emotions (which isn't a bad thing because art should make you feel something, and having no emotional impact is probably the worst thing that can happen, and art is often specifically crafted to get a specific emotional response) (remind me at some point to ramble about the Silent Scene in The Last Jedi, because that is a masterclass in well-designed emotional impacts landing), which is a delicate difference. I won't know if this is the case until I listen to the track in full, but right now, I'm tentatively hopeful I get that third kind with this song.

Vibrato. You see why I like these guys? We also get some reverb on one of the voices at one point, which is interesting and unexpected, especially because we get vibrato at the same time. This really is a gorgeous song, and it reminds me of another song, but I couldn't even begin to figure out even what genre it is. Although, I say that and I think this reminds me a little of Hyunsik's song La Mar. I don't necessarily think that was the song that I was originally thinking of, but the vocal tones and abilities are very similar, which is a huge compliment because even if Hyunsik's isn't my favorite of the BTOB voices, I still consider it top tier. Even being vaguely reminded of it is a huge compliment.

This is such a 3am post-break-up song. The music video is soft and beautiful in a very grounded sort of way, and full of wistful memories.