By Eliana Fermi
There’s a particular kind of movement that doesn’t feel like escape. It feels like suspension, like being carried forward before you’ve fully understood what you’ve left behind. Time passes cleanly, evenly, almost reassuringly. But something underneath it lags, resists, holds on.
Owen Riegling’s In the Feeling lives inside that space.
Arriving as his sophomore full-length under Universal Music Canada and Big Loud Records, the album captures a period where momentum outpaces certainty. This is where the life of the road begins to shape not just where you are, but who you’re becoming. Framed as a coming-of-age record, it moves through distance, relationships, and self-recognition. But more than that, it constructs a world in which motion itself becomes the one constant against which everything else orbits. Emotion, identity, and belonging must negotiate its place.
In the Feeling hits like a sequence of songs that settles into a condition, a state of being carried forward. From its opening moments, the album establishes a quiet but insistent truth: motion is not escape. It is the core the moves us forward. And within that structure, the self is forced to take shape.
The record has been framed as a road album, a narrative stretched across distance, memory, and transition. But what becomes clear in sustained listening is that the “road” is more than thematic. It is embedded in the music’s DNA. A steady pulse, often literalized through quarter note emphasis in drums, bass, acoustic strumming, even handclaps, runs like a spinal current through the album. This pulse keeps time and it holds the songs together as everything else shifts: perspective, emotional weight, relational clarity, even formal structure. What emerges is a pulse-anchored selfhood system. This puts Riesling’s singing in a musical environment where identity is gradually stabilized against constant forward movement.
“Phone Call From Home” introduces this condition with deceptive simplicity. The groove is grounded, almost stubbornly so, the drums and bass leaning into a steady, unbroken pulse that resists fragmentation. Around it, however, the song breathes with melodies that extend upward in long, connected lines. At key moments, background vocals gather and recede, and the arrangement expands into a more forceful rock backbeat as the emotional stakes rise. The bridge shifts harmonically, offering momentary disorientation, before the track collapses into a breakdown and rebuilds. The effect is subtle but profound, but the listener is never allowed to drift. The pulse remains is the constant that grounds, even as the emotional terrain becomes more complex. Home, in this context, is not a place reached, but a presence felt more sharply the further one moves from it.
This relationship between steadiness and expansion becomes pronounced as the album progresses. Riegling’s songwriting frequently plays with perceived temporal shifts with metric illusions, pre-chorus decelerations, and call-and-response choruses that stretch melodic space without abandoning the underlying grid. These are not ornamental gestures. They are structural expressions of the album’s central tension, which is how to experience emotional fluctuation without losing directional coherence. The answer lies in the pulse that never disappear; thereby it absorbs the instability.
“Same Blood” begins as a restrained acoustic ballad, it gradually unfolds into a broader, more texturally dense arrangement. The move into a 6/4 feel could easily fracture the album’s rhythmic identity, but instead it reinforces it. The quarter-note emphasis persists, recontextualized within a wider frame. The drums withdraw and re-enter, the band swells and recedes, and the form itself feels less cyclical than developmental. The time signature does not matter, but the continuity of motion within it does. The song suggests that identity, especially familial or inherited identity, s not static, but elastic, capable of stretching without breaking so long as its internal pulse remains intact.
“Going Missing” moves to let the mood darken. The groove takes on a swung quality, the backbeat loosens, and the vocal delivery becomes more rhythmic, almost incantatory. The repeated line, “I’m going missing,” functions as a narrative statement hued as a psychological loop. The band mirrors this instability, cycling through dynamic contrasts: stripped-down passages give way to full, distorted choruses, then recede again. The pulse persists. It is less overt, more submerged, but still present. This is crucial. The song does not depict disappearance as collapse, but as a condition held within a steady heartbeat. The self may feel fragmented, but it has not dissolved. The heart contains it.
Throughout the album, Riegling demonstrates a consistent compositional instinct: tension is introduced through variation, but resolved through return. Bridges give way to breakdowns; interludes dissolve into re-entry; choruses often feature sustained, legato phrasing that stretches across the barline before settling back into the groove. These gestures are not formulaic, they are stabilizing. They allow the listener to experience emotional escalation without losing orientation. Even in the more overtly accessible moments, where handclaps reinforce the beat or guitar hooks lean toward sing-along immediacy, the music moves forward, but it does not drift.
“Anything But Me,” the closing track, reframes everything that precedes it. From the outset, the familiar elements are present: acoustic guitar, steady rhythmic figure, the gradual layering of percussion and backing vocals. But there is a subtle shift in how the system behaves. The build feels less like compensation for uncertainty and more like affirmation. The rhythmic motive in the pre-chorus tightens, the toms enter with increasing assertiveness, and the chorus opens into a more expansive melodic range. When Riegling lands on the line “I can’t imagine being anything but me,” the sustained delivery, held across multiple beats, supported by a fully engaged ensemble, feels earned rather than imposed. The pulse that once anchored a searching identity now supports a declared one.
Even the final gestures matter. The move into falsetto, the emotional release in the closing vocal, the energy that carries the track to its conclusion—these are not departures from the system, but its culmination. For the first time, the voice seems to push beyond the constraints it has previously navigated. And yet, the pulse remains. It has not restricted expression; it has enabled it.
What In the Feeling ultimately achieves is a reconciliation between motion and selfhood without dissolving the tension between them. The album does not resolve the contradictions it presents. The distance and intimacy, uncertainty and confidence, solitude and connection are organized by them. By grounding its musical language in a consistent pulse, it creates a space in which these contradictions can coexist, evolve, and eventually cohere.
In this sense, Riegling’s sophomore effort is a step forward in artistic maturity. The road is not just where these songs take place; it is how they think, how they feel, how they hold together. And by the time the album closes, that road has done its work. The road has provided the path, delivering the self to a destination, but by giving it something far more difficult to sustain: continuity.
In the Feeling is, at its core, a record about becoming and learning how to remain intact while everything keeps moving. That’s the short of it!
