Introduction
Funny until it isn't
There's a specific kind of person this song is about. Not someone who gave up, but someone who keeps moving at full speed with nothing to show for it. The party never quite lifts off, the hustle never quite pays out, and somewhere in the blur of van life and beach sleeping and CBD that tastes wrong, they wake up and realize the direction has been wrong the whole time.
"Backwards" earns its thesis slowly. The word doesn't even arrive until after the first verse and pre-chorus circle around it, and that delay is the whole point. You don't always know you're going backwards while it's happening.
Verse 1
The party that never ignites
The song opens at what should be a peak moment: a stage show, a crowd moving, energy building. But something's off. The observation everyone keeps landing on isn't that the party's wild or alive.
"I never seen a party that could get so"
The sentence gets cut off before the punchline, which is the point. The crowd is moving, but they're not going anywhere. The energy is real but the result is wrong.
Pre-Chorus
Slow, then the drop
The missing word finally arrives: "slow in the moment." It's not exactly the devastating reveal you'd expect. It's almost anticlimactic, which is by design. The pre-chorus names the feeling without dramatizing it. The party froze. The moment that was supposed to pop just... didn't.
The "oh no" that follows is delivered with just enough dread to signal that this isn't just about one night.
Chorus
One word does all the work
"Backwards." That's it. The whole diagnosis. What was slow becomes something worse: active regression. Not standing still, but moving in the wrong direction, and doing it repeatedly.
"Always going backwards"
The repetition in the post-chorus is key. "The problem with the friends of mine" pulls it slightly outward, like the narrator is observing a crew, not just confessing. But there's no real distance there. They're describing themselves from the outside because it's easier than owning it directly.
Verse 2
The inventory of a life unraveling
This is where the song gets specific and almost uncomfortably funny. The narrator rattles off their current situation in one long breath: running on empty, crawling for cash, buying weed on EBT, packing a van, losing the thread of attention mid-sentence.
"I got ADDDDD, no attention span / And this CBD tastes like PCP"
The self-aware absurdity here is doing real work. These aren't excuses, they're confessions delivered with a shrug. And then the kicker: sleeping on the beach because the relationship ended. That last detail lands harder than it should because it's dropped in so casually, no drama attached.
The picture is someone who is technically active, packing bags, working on a tan, always moving, but whose life is shedding things one by one. The hustle looks like momentum. It isn't.
Verse 3
No bottom, no arrival
By the third verse the narrator has crossed into Mexico, is using harder stuff, and the chaos has moved from funny to genuinely destabilizing.
"And I'm tweakin' 'til my brain explodes / And I'm freakin' out every other night"
What changes here is the resignation. The song shifts from describing the loop to accepting it as permanent. "I'll be this way until I die" isn't said with anguish. It's almost calm, which is the most unsettling version of that line you can deliver. The countdown into the final chorus feels like someone pressing play on the same record one more time because they don't know what else to do.
Conclusion
The loop as a lifestyle
"Backwards" never offers a way out, and it doesn't pretend to want one. The post-chorus adds one line late in the song that reframes everything: "I work until my back hurts / but no matter how much I try." That's the real emotional center. This isn't a song about laziness or apathy. It's about effort that produces nothing forward, effort that somehow accelerates the reverse. The grind is real. The direction is just wrong. And by the end, the narrator has stopped being surprised by that. They've made their peace with the loop, packed their clothes and their nose, and kept moving. Backwards, always.
