B-Side Guys

Los Angeles rocker Chris Lorraine transforms personal demons into sonic brimstone with “Devil at Your Side,” a visceral descent into relationship hell that merges doom metal’s weight with psychedelic rock’s fever-dream aesthetics. The track rumbles up from the underground scene where Lorraine has built his reputation at legendary venues like The Viper Room, carrying all the grit and venom of countless nights spent perfecting his particular brand of heavy.

The song’s narrative wastes no time establishing its infernal imagery, painting a portrait of a relationship corroded by toxicity and blame. When Lorraine growls “Has the world left you stranded/I watched as you fell/When you reached for the hands in the red lakes of hell,” he’s not just building metaphor – he’s documenting emotional geography with the precision of a war correspondent.

Production-wise, “Devil at Your Side” embraces the sludgy underbelly of psychedelic rock, letting distortion smear across the tracks like tar while maintaining enough clarity to let each venomous lyric punch through. This balancing act between clarity and chaos serves the material’s emotional core, particularly during lines like “Static on your skin/Angry thoughts in your brain,” where the instrumentation mirrors the static interference of toxic love.

Lorraine’s vocal delivery evolves throughout the track, moving from accusatory verses to a chorus that somehow manages to sound both wounded and threatening. The repeated refrain of “You’ve got the Devil at your side” takes on different shades of meaning with each iteration, shifting from observation to accusation to something approaching desperate prayer.

The bridge section introduces a particularly effective moment where the instrumentation pulls back just enough to highlight the raw confession: “It’s so unforgivable what you did to my life/I watch you smile as I drown in a loud swarm of flies.” Here, Lorraine drops the metaphysical imagery for direct confrontation, making the return to supernatural imagery in the final chorus hit even harder.

Structurally, the song builds like gathering storm clouds, with tension accumulating through verses that paint increasingly darker pictures. The image of “black chariots and fire/Circling round’ in the skies” creates a cinematic scope that contrasts effectively with more intimate details like “you hold my whole world in the palm of your hands,” highlighting the way personal apocalypses can feel as devastating as biblical ones.

The track’s success lies in how it treats its supernatural elements not as mere window dressing, but as essential tools for mapping emotional terrain. When Lorraine describes his ex-partner as “one hundred degrees with strange passions,” he’s capturing something specific about desire’s ability to distort perception and judgment. The heat imagery returns throughout the song, creating a through-line that ties the personal to the mythological.

The final verse, with its image of “my face in the firelight up in your eyes,” brings the narrative full circle, suggesting that perhaps the real devil isn’t walking beside anyone, but reflected in every accusation and counter-accusation. It’s a sophisticated piece of songwriting that uses its genre conventions to illuminate rather than obscure its emotional truths.

This meditation on toxic love avoids the typical traps of the “evil ex” narrative by keeping its focus on the warped perceptions that pain creates rather than simple demonization. In doing so, Lorraine has crafted something more unsettling than a mere breakup song – he’s documented the way relationship trauma can turn both parties into something unrecognizable to themselves.