Arrows in Action
Arrows in Action Credit: Kelsey Runge

The gamer-to-musician pipeline exploded after games like 2005’s Guitar Hero and its later cousin, Rock Band, turned living rooms into makeshift stages. For Gainesville’s Arrows in Action, two of the trio’s members found their rhythm about five feet from a TV screen, plastic instruments in hand.

“I got to a level where the notes wouldn’t even show up on the screen anymore, so I basically memorized all of ‘Enter Sandman.’ At that point, I didn’t even play the drums, but I remember thinking, ‘I think I could actually do this,’” drummer Jesse Frimmel tells Orlando Weekly.

Arrows in Action formed in Gainesville — home of the University of Florida — where Victor Viramontes-Pattinson, Matthew Fowler and Frimmel found each other through overlapping stints in the city’s local music scene and eventually on campus. 

Those run-ins eventually became Arrows in Action, a vibrant alt-rock trio with a knack for getting you to dance through emotional lyrics, elegantly disguising the ache beneath bright melodies and infectious hooks. 

The band has since racked up millions of streams across platforms. “Cheekbones,” a single from their latest album, I Think I’ve Been Here Before, found another life on TikTok, helping push the song to roughly 23 million streams on Spotify. At times, the album feels like waking up in the 2000s again, with Panic! at the Disco on the same playlist and a studded belt somehow making its way back into our outfit. But beneath the throwback sheen, the band keeps the record up-to-date with a clean and more modern pop sound. In April, the trio returned to this record, releasing a deluxe edition with previously unheard tracks to brighten the mood a bit.

This week, Arrows in Action is setting out on a headlining tour, and Orlando gets first dibs. The tour opens with back-to-back nights at the Social on Thursday and Friday, in a city the band has slowly come to claim as something of a spiritual hometown.

“It becomes the central point where our people from up north and people from all over Florida get to see us,” says guitarist Fowler. Clearly his theory is correct; Friday’s show has already sold out, and tickets for the added Thursday date are going fast.

The band are giving that homecoming a little more purpose, too. For both shows, they’ve partnered with the Mustard Seed of Central Florida for a clothing drive, inviting fans to bring donations along with them. This follows the trio’s longtime habit of community engagement, supporting causes from food drives to immigrant rights, Planned Parenthood and more. 

“We’ve always tried to make it a thing to come up with some way to turn a tour into a way to give back,” says Frimmel.

A week after opening their tour in Orlando, that hometown momentum carries them to Louisville’s Louder Than Life, a four-day festival that drew hundreds of thousands of attendees from around the world last year.

The run will look a little different from behind the drumkit, though. After very recently injuring his hand, Frimmel will be stepping away from the kit while he recovers, with Ronnie Strauss of I Don’t Know How But They Found Me expected to fill in.

And even as the band heads toward stages that might make their Guitar Hero: Metallica-playing younger selves proud, their own musical tastes have “mellowed out” over the years. 

This hard-rock spark may have gotten them started, but their influences have expanded much further. As Arrows in Action moves into a broader pop space, the trio is pulling from R&B and artists like Justin Bieber while becoming increasingly interested in the history behind different genres and how those ideas can find their way into their music.

For vocalist Viramontes-Pattinson, that evolution still comes with plenty of pop-punk DNA. He points to Panic! at the Disco and Fall Out Boy as major influences, something that comes through in Arrows in Action’s own sound on I Think I’ve Been Here Before.

The record is split between brighter pop-rock moments and songs that are awash in heavier emotions, while the deluxe edition makes some extra room for the lighter side of the band. Even its imagery plays with that push-and-pull. The album’s artwork grew from the idea of placing an abstract lighthouse somewhere it seemingly didn’t belong.

“People think that you’re supposed to go toward it, but what a lighthouse does is the opposite,” Viramontes-Pattinson says. “If you follow it, you’ll crash into the rocks.”

For them, the album represents an interpretative approach to nostalgia and familiarity, likening it to a double-edged sword. 

When asked what stands out among their previous shows in the city, the band points back to last year’s Warped Tour, where they walked onstage unsure whether anyone would be out in the crowd at all.

“We were scheduled to start at the same time as one of the big headliners, and we were telling ourselves, ‘If nobody shows up, that’s OK,’” Viramontes-Pattinson says. “When we finally got out there, you couldn’t see the end of the crowd from where we were. It was probably the most people that we’ve played in front of … and they knew the words!”

Arrows in Action returns to Orlando for a tour-opening two nights at the Social.  And the crowd will most definitely know the words.

6 p.m. Thursday-Friday, Sept. 10-11, The Social, 54 N. Orange Ave., foundation-presents.com, $26.

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This article appears in Sept. 9-15, 2026.