I'm in the middle of reading Peter Brannen's The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything—it's excellent and goes deep into the (bio)geochemistry of Earth—and he presents a good case for a metabolism-first development of life, taking advantage of "a disequilibrium that needed to be relieved at the vents, an unending stream d free energy to dissipate," rather than the RNA information-first theories.

It fits his overall narrative but it was an interesting way to think about life "as a thermodynamically necessary mechanism to relieve the continuous production of free geochemical energy on Earth... more efficiently than abiotic processes could." (Brannen quoting complex-systems scientist Anne-Marie Grisogono) I highly recommend the book.