Circles
Post Malone · Hollywood's Bleeding
Honest about being stuck, but stuck is where it ends
What do these signals mean?
- Edifying: Points the heart toward God, truth, hope, or love.
- Worth Weighing: Real good and real concern together. Test it before you take it in.
- Take Caution: Leans toward what could dull or mislead. Approach carefully.
- Consider Avoiding: Celebrates what Scripture warns against. Little here builds up.
Weighed against Scripture
“As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.”
The image of returning to what harms you fits the cycle the song describes precisely. The song itself uses 'running in circles' as its central metaphor for this same pattern.
“Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.”
The song's admission that the relationship was primarily sexual sits in quiet tension with the call to treat the body and intimacy as something worth protecting, not just something to walk away from after the fact.
“Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”
The song wants to let go but can't. Paul's image of pressing forward and not looking back points toward the kind of resolve the song aches for but doesn't find.
Circles is a well-crafted portrait of relational inertia: two people who know they're wrong for each other but keep cycling back anyway. The song names the dysfunction clearly and even acknowledges the relationship was built more on physical attraction than real connection. What it doesn't offer is any direction out. The loop the song describes is also the loop it lives in emotionally, which makes it resonant but ultimately unresolved.
Mostly clean language. One candid line admits the relationship was primarily physical ('it was just the s*x though'), which is the song's most pointed moment.
The song captures emotional exhaustion and the pull of a failing relationship with real honesty, but it doesn't reach toward anything beyond the cycle itself. There's recognition that it needs to end, yet no movement toward hope or healing.
Post Malone is describing the emotional trap of a relationship that both people know is over but neither can leave. The intent reads as honest storytelling and emotional release rather than glorification.
When you listen to this, does it help you name something you've been through, or does it make leaving a hard situation feel more impossible than it already is?