Drew Schueler steps forward with “I Thought By Now,” a modern hymn for anyone whose timeline slipped the script.
Every quarter-life crisis deserves its own hymn, and Drew Schueler’s “I Thought By Now” arrives like a confession whispered over blue light and unpaid dreams. The title track from his EP Vulnerable For Once turns the myth of linear success into a beautifully uncomfortable mirror: childhood certainty curdles into adult self-doubt, a wife pays the mortgage while he counts likes, friends insist he’s “doing the right things” as he feels trapped on a treadmill. Schueler sings it all with a disarming, soul-soaked tenderness over crisp guitar riffs and chill electro-pop textures, his voice hovering between prayer and panic. The central line—“I thought by now I’d have more figured out”—doesn’t simply function as a hook; it becomes an existential refrain, the kind you mutter to yourself brushing your teeth at 2 a.m.
What makes the track so affecting is its structural arc. For most of the song, the production stays intimate and grounded, acoustic pop sensibilities framing lyrics that are almost embarrassingly honest—work, time, algorithms, the quiet humiliation of stagnation. Then the floor drops out: the ending erupts into a future-bass EDM storm, a luminous, chaotic outro where affirmations (“Caught up in the noise / Data in the void / But I’m annointed / And the truth is / I’m meant for this”) drops in like a glitchy benediction. That switch feels less like a stylistic gimmick and more like the sonic embodiment of spiralling thoughts finally transmuting into resolve. The listener is carried from paralysis to a ragged kind of faith, as if Schueler is staging his own altar call inside a digital hurricane. You don’t just hear “I Thought By Now”; you feel your own unfinished life humming along with it.
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