"Target Practice" gives its narrator the best reason in the world to kill someone. It also refuses to let the killing finish anything. A family member was murdered, a mother swallowed the grief until it came out of her skin as sweat, and the person responsible now walks the same streets as the people he broke. The song is about revenge handed down through a wounded family, and about how that revenge outlives its target and hardens into a habit with no end point.
Verse 1: a threat with a schedule
The song opens cold. No backstory. No reason. Just a promise and a locked drawer.
"I've got plans that I'll never share with you / And only when you're dying will I ever know"
Read that second line into the one after it and the grammar clicks. Only when the target is dying will the narrator know "if you see me walking by." The narrator wants to be seen. They want proof the killer ever registered them as a person, and the only moment they can imagine getting that proof is the target's last breath. Even then they're guessing.
The line that chills me most is the excuse that follows: "just know I haven't time." An avenger brushing past their target like someone running late for work. Murder gets slotted in between errands. That calm is scarier than any scream would be.
Then the threat widens. "I'll never let your family forget." The narrator is already reaching past the target to the people around him, and "look into my eyes" repeats the demand from before. See me. Remember me. Carry this.
Verse 2: the pronoun changes and the reason arrives
The second verse opens with the reason, and the voice shifts from "I" to "we."
"My mother couldn't cry when you took her brother's life / She sat and sweated out the pain"
Suddenly the menace has a family behind it. The mother never got the release of tears. The grief came out as fever, as a body overheating in a chair. Whatever stopped her crying, shock or duty or the need to hold everyone else together, the pain had nowhere to go but through her pores.
And now go back to the chorus. On first pass, "Don't cry, you deserve this" sounds like pure sadism. After verse 2 it sounds like a verdict. It's also the exact rule the mother lived under. She couldn't cry, so the target doesn't get to either. The narrator takes the family's wound and passes it forward, and calls the transfer justice. The order is an inheritance.
"You took, took, took till there was nothing left to take / Our dreams, our hopes, our names"
Dreams and hopes make sense. Names is the strange one. A killing can rename a family. They stop being whoever they were and become the people whose brother was murdered, and "you're the one we blame" becomes the thing that holds them together. Blame is now their identity.
A fan can fairly hear this whole stretch as righteous release: a verdict earned, a chorus built to scream back at whoever walked free. The grievance is real and the song never undercuts it. But the song keeps going after the verdict, and what it does next tells you how it really feels about that release.
The spike and the aim
"If we see you on a spike with holes for your eyes / We'll just keep practicing our aim"
A spike is where you display a body. A trophy. A warning. The target is dead and put on show. The holes where his eyes were matter because verse 1 begged him to "look into my eyes." Now he never can. The recognition the narrator wanted is gone for good.
So they keep shooting, because the death delivered nothing they were actually hungry for, and practice is what you do for a shot you still think is coming, which means the family has turned vengeance into a routine with no target left to hit. The title names that routine. The revenge has become target practice.
Verse 3: the sentence that never ends
The last verse is short and broken. "Plans that I'll never share" becomes "plans that I have to follow through." Desire has turned into obligation.
"And only when you die will I ever know / If you see me in the sky and you break into a smile"
The sentence starts and never finishes. Who is in the sky? Maybe the narrator, dead and looking down. Maybe the murdered uncle. Maybe nobody can say. That line resists any clean reading, and the gap seems built in. Then the chorus collapses mid-word: "don't cry, don't cry-" and stops.
Conclusion
Both things stay true to the end. The family has every right to its rage, and the rage buys them nothing. They wanted to be seen by the man who took their brother. They got a face with holes in it and a gun they can't put down. The final "don't cry" cuts off before it lands on anyone, and the way I hear it, that unfinished order belongs to the listener now. The song hands you the same wound the mother sat with, and like her, you're left with nowhere to put it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Target Practice" by My New Band Believe about?
The song is narrated by someone hunting the person who killed their mother's brother. It follows that revenge from a cold, unexplained threat to a family grievance, and shows the vengeance continuing even after the target is dead, turning into a habit that never delivers relief.
What does "If we see you on a spike with holes for your eyes, we'll just keep practicing our aim" mean?
The image pictures the killer dead and displayed like a trophy, his eyes gone so he can never look back at the family. Even then they keep shooting. The line shows revenge outlasting its target and becoming a routine, which is what the title "Target Practice" names.
Why does the narrator in "Target Practice" keep saying "don't cry"?
The narrator's mother "couldn't cry" when her brother was killed, so ordering the killer not to cry passes the same burden back onto him. The final "don't cry" is cut off mid-word, leaving the command and the grief unresolved.
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