Abstract In this note we revisit the emergent conformal symmetry in the near-ring region of warped spacetime. In particular, we propose a novel construction of the emergent near-ring sl(2, ℝ)QNM symmetry. We show that each eikonal QNM family falls into one highest-weight representation of this algebra, and sl(2, ℝ)QNM can be related to the near-ring isometry group sl(2, ℝ)ISO in a simple way. Furthermore we find that the coherent state space of sl(2, ℝ)QNM can be identified with the phase space of the photon ring.