Nashville-based alternative pop-rock trio Arrows in Action is experiencing a full-circle moment on its current tour. The band comes to House of Blues on Wednesday for a sold-out show that finds it opening for the Home Team.
The two bands first played together in 2019 to rooms of 30 people. In a recent Zoom interview with the full band, members recalled a Jacksonville, FL show with the Home Team that sold zero tickets.
“We played to each other, but we had a great night,” says guitarist Matt Fowler. “We bonded over so many things. All these years of being buddies have gone by and then, to get onstage in front of 1,000, sometimes, almost 2,000 people on this tour with them is fucking unbelievable.”
Singer-guitarist Victor Viramontes-Pattison joins the Home Team on stage every night for the extended version of “All Squeezed Out,” which features Arrows in Action. He refers to it as “one of the most challenging vocal features I’ve ever had to do.”
Fowler also joins the Home Team’s set for a guitar solo each night.
“We’ve always stayed in touch, and have always bounced ideas back and forth, between our two bands, which has been very cool,” says Viramontes-Pattison. “Even though we are a bit different, we just get along really well. I think it’s the same vibe.”
Founding member of Arrows in Action and drummer Jesse Frimmel adds that the two bands coming back together to do a large national tour, when the time was right, has been on their minds this whole time.
“We just hit it off with them. So, I think, we’ve all known that this tour was going to happen eventually,” says Frimmel. “Now, to be on it with them and have it be very successful is just like a dream come true.”
The band, as it stands now, came together after Arrows in Action opened for Viramontes-Pattison’s former band’s final show. Viramontes-Pattison was tapped to join Arrows in Action after its former singer left. Fowler joined a few years later, and that’s when it clicked.
“That became like the thing. Once it was the three of us, it was like, ‘Oh… we’ve got this,’” says Frimmel, “That was when we truly went for it.”
Fowler slyly referred to the trio coming together as an “all-star band.”
“That was the fire we needed under our butts, too,” says Viramontes-Pattison.
The trio, which formed at the University of Florida in Gainesville, did the “local Florida band grind” for a while, playing wherever they could book gigs in various cities across the state. The furthest they had ventured was Georgia. Once the band finally booked a run of shows outside of the south, COVID hit, and Arrows in Action was forced to cancel its planned tour of the Northeastern U.S.
So, the three musicians moved into a house together, consistently posted on social media, went live on TikTok every week to play acoustic sets, and watched the number of people joining slowly grow, with loyal fans coming back each week. Arrows in Action built as much online traction as possible and hoped for the best.
“That sort of set us up for just appreciating every second of touring and meeting people, once we really got to do it,” says Fowler, “Because I think there was a period of time where we weren’t sure if that was gonna happen at all.”
He nods to the diverse collection of other artists who experienced their “initial growth period” during the pandemic.
The band’s first true “van tour” came in December 2021 with Taylor Acorn and This Wild Life. Arrows in Action traded stand-alone shows for nationally touring ever since.
Cut to present day, where the trio just played a Warped Tour Orlando set that overlapped with Cleveland native MGK’s set time, but still somehow generated an impressive crowd, filling the entire capacity of the smaller stage they snagged a nighttime slot on.
“They had to go, ‘I want to see Arrows in Action. I’m going to walk a half mile over there,” Frimmel says to laughter from his bandmates. “And it was definitely one of the largest crowds we’ve got to play to.”
The festival show was extra meaningful to the band since it was the location they went to see Warped Tour, growing up, when it was still on its cross-country run.
The band isn’t new to the communal nature of the alternative music scene. Arrows in Action was also a part of the seven-act Idobi Radio Summer School Tour that made its way to the Agora earlier this year. Arrows in Action, who visited the Rock Hall while in town for the Summer School stop, is also booked to join Boys Like Girls at MGM Northfield Park on April Fool’s Day of 2026.
With its second full-length, Arrows in Action wanted to achieve something “brighter” and “dancier” than its past catalogue, and the approach has been translating well to live shows.
The band agrees that September’s full-length release, I Think I’ve Been Here Before took a more coordinated approach. The pop meets alternative rock record with a groovy, jazz-infused quality is split into a brighter “daytime” A-Side and a darker “nighttime” B-Side.
“I feel like, the last record, we were just writing everything we wanted to. But with this record…each song was kind of pointing in the same direction,” says Viramontes-Pattison. “Built to Last, our first record, was a lot more eclectic, and kind of went off in every direction to do everything that we wanted to do on our first full-length, because we didn’t want to just be like just pocketed into one sound.”
“We could see the different puzzle pieces, instead of just going wild with it, which I think created a lot more cohesive piece of art,” says Fowler.
The split album approach still made space for range, however. They didn’t want to totally leave their “sad” songwriting in the past.
“That’s why both ‘styles’ of writing and multiple subject matters need to live together on a record, always,” says Fowler in response to praise for the existential B- side ballad “Nobody Told Me.” Singer-songwriter Cassadee Pope lent her pen to Viramontes-Pattison’s concept that Fowler is glad found its home on the B-Side.
Viramontes-Pattison refers to it as “the one that hurt everyone’s feelings – sorry about that.”
The band tapped its longtime producer and co-writer Dan Swank, along with friend Skyler Acord and past collaborator Graham Laderman to help make I Think I’ve Been Here Before.
“And then, our secret weapon Spencer Jordan always comes in,” says Viramontes-Pattison. “Helping us write some of the best stuff.”
The band wrote, recorded, and produced the album between Nashville and Lake Arrowhead, CA.
“This was the first time we had worked with Sky,” says Frimmel. “That was different and gave us quite a big a level up.”
Fowler gives Acord a nod for his contributions to the recording process and groove of the album, as well as the writing process.
“His bass performances on those couple of songs was something, I think, very unique to this record, that we hadn’t had.”
Arrows in Action also ventured into new lyrical territory on the ironically named I Think I’ve Been Here Before.
“Light Like You” contains the album’s standout hook, “She said, “Do you wanna do acid?’/ I said, ‘I’ve been dying to get out of my head’,” which was a big hit with European audiences and, to Fowler’s surprise, U.S. audiences as well.
“A couple pumpkin espresso martinis,” Viramontes-Pattison laughs, when asked how “Light Like You” came about. But his counterparts quickly corrected him that it was Frosés from a spot near the studio: one there on a break, one to go as they headed back to the studio around 10:30 p.m. after writing for a different song all day.
All three band members are smiling at the memory.
“We were messing around with some progression, and then, like the lyric and the melody kind of just popped into my head for, ‘She said do you wanna do acid?’” recalls Frimmel. “And I said it as a joke, cause I was like a little, you know, maybe a little tipsy and thought it was fun. And then, I think Dan finished the line. And we were like, wait, this is something. And we went from like jam mode, to, ‘Wait a minute, we gotta write this song.’”
Viramontes-Pattison pointed out that it was one of the few times they wrote to serve a story or concept, rather than just seeing where the journey of writing led them.
Fowler calls it the closest thing to a “risk” on the record and says it’s his favorite to play live lately. It’s Frimmel’s as well.
“It was pretty sick to hear like a thousand people scream ‘Acid’ at Warped Tour,” smirks Viramontes-Pattison.
“We were just enjoying the moment and thought it was funny at first, and then went like, well, wait, ‘Can we do that? Can our band do that?’ recalls Frimmel. “And we were like, ‘Yeah! Of course we can!”
Viramontes-Pattison feels like the track opened a door for them, creatively.
“Being funny in our music is something that is still novel to us, I think,” says Viramontes-Pattison. “We’re very funny and very compelling onstage.”
“That’s right!” Fowler exclaims.
The chorus only took the band twenty minutes to write, that night.
“In music, it is something that we’ve been trying to play with a little more, and I think it’s really fun,” says Viramontes-Pattison. “We’ve always written such emotional lyrics in the early stages of our band that it’s been cool to look at new ways to write together.”
“Cheekbones isn’t funny, but its’ also like, different,” Frimmel says of the most-streamed song on the album, by far, boasting almost 14 million Spotify streams since its late 2024 release as the second single that made its way onto the album.
“Cheekbones” started with a guitar riff from Fowler and the concept of “cheekbones” from Jordan, who ran with a melody and chorus that Frimmel started.
The chorus lived on its own for a couple of months, before the band finished writing the song with Laderman and Acord.
“It was funny, cause it wasn’t a vampire song. With the chorus, like that wasn’t the idea at all,” says Frimmel. “I had been listening to it and I was like, “Guys I think – I know this might sound funny, but like, what if she’s a vampire?’”.
“Well, cause it was hard to say it wasn’t that,” says Fowler. “We were all together on the first day, and that chorus came to be, and then, we were like, ‘Well, it’s a little vampire-y, but we can save it from that. We can make it normal. And then, I think, you were just like, ‘Why? Why fight?”
“I think picking a theme is something we’ve been learning to do a lot more in our music. Whether it’s funny or serious, or whatever it is, picking a theme helps us then get to the point. So, like, going into the writing with Skyler and Graham being like, ‘This is a vampire song. Like, every vampire vocabulary you have,’ made it a lot easier and more fun to, like, make it live in that world,” adds Viramontes-Pattison.
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