B-Side Guys

Inside the greasy spoon diner of a broken heart, Ali Surti has crafted a menu of madness. “Worms” transforms post-breakup delirium into a surreal ordering session where coleslaw shares space with psycho gravy, and every item comes with a side of mental dissolution.

The track’s architecture mirrors the mind’s attempt to organize chaos through increasingly desperate categorization. Food items appear like totems of sanity—cheesecake lady, biscuit shaker, salty baker—each one a failed attempt to make sense of emotional upheaval through mundane objects.

“I’m so fried, my brain’s frying” serves as both confession and chorus, the repetition itself becoming a symptom of the condition it describes. But Surti’s delivery suggests something beyond simple breakdown—there’s a manic glee in the collapse, a liberation in losing touch with reality’s menu prices.

The production captures the fluorescent flicker of late-night dissociation. Each element feels slightly overexposed, like photos developed in coffee instead of chemicals. When “humans all look the same,” it’s not just disconnection being documented but a new way of seeing through trauma’s lens.

Surti’s lyrics progress through stages of psychological fast food preparation: first the worms invade, then the baking begins, finally culminating in the cryptic mantra of “walrus feet”—repeated with the increasing urgency of someone trying to remember their regular order at a restaurant they’ve visited every day for years.

The recurring promise that “if I move fast they can’t fry me here” suggests both escape plan and delusion. It’s the logic of someone who believes they can outrun their own synapses, dodge their own neurons, skip out on the check their emotions are trying to deliver.

Movement becomes primary defense mechanism—against memory, against processing, against the very act of being present with pain. But like a short-order cook on a endless shift, the track keeps serving up new variations on the same fundamental ingredients.

Between declarations about fried brains and walrus appendages, there’s a deeper truth being plated: sometimes sanity looks less like keeping it together and more like finding the right container for falling apart. Each surreal image serves as its own kind of holding pattern, a way to circle the truth without having to land directly on it.

“Worms” documents that peculiar moment when heartbreak turns the familiar strange and the strange familiar, when every diner becomes a David Lynch set, and every menu item might contain hidden messages about what went wrong. It’s not just a song about losing your mind—it’s about what you find when you stop trying to keep it.