Rebelution’s Eric Rachmany Looks Back While Moving Forward with “Back in Time”

Rebelution just headlined Reggae Rise Up Arizona, and frontman Eric Rachmany is back home in Santa Barbara with a new single on the way. “Back in Time,” the band’s first release since 2023, channels a ’90s sensibility that Rachmany links directly to his own formative listening years. At 42, he seems less interested in chasing novelty than in tracing the threads that hold his band’s audience together.

That impulse makes a conversation about “Feeling Alright” almost inevitable. The track, from Rebelution’s 2007 debut Courage to Grow, has passed 108 million Spotify streams without ever feeling like a hit engineered for scale. Rachmany wrote it in Isla Vista, where the band played driveways and backyards, building a community before there was a career. The song was always directed outward—a sing-along conceived from the stage, with the crowd’s voice written into the arrangement. Two decades later, that exchange hasn’t dimmed. Fans still send the words back, and Rachmany still relies on the momentum.

The success of “Feeling Alright” didn’t come from a calculated hook, but from a chord progression that suggested a specific kind of imagery and a lyric that simply addressed the people in front of him. Instrumental storytelling led, as it often does in his writing. With “Back in Time,” Rachmany returns to that method, but from a different vantage point. The nostalgia isn’t for a lost decade; it’s for a sense of connection that started small and somehow stayed intact.