B-Side Guys

Farewells rarely arrive with clean edges. Puppy Fade’s February 2025 release “In The City” embraces this messy reality, delivering a Leeds valediction wrapped in distortion and unresolved emotional debris.

The track immediately establishes an urban melancholy, beginning with the narrator’s confession that despite “a thousand reasons” to embrace city life, they’ve “lost them all.” This sentiment—disappointment beneath expectation—provides the emotional foundation for a song that operates simultaneously as eulogy and liberation.

Musically, Puppy Fade crafts a soundscape that perfectly mirrors this duality. Guitar tones shift between shimmering verses and crunching choruses, creating sonic neighborhoods within the track that mirror the fragmented experience of city life. The production cleverly employs spatial elements—reverb expands during reflective moments while compression tightens around the more urgent declarations, particularly when the narrator recounts a lover’s accusation of selfishness.

The lyrics paint Leeds with remarkable specificity—”morphine sky” and “beggars…line the curb”—creating a cityscape that feels both observed and lived-in. Most evocative is the image of “a pair of brothers/With brick dust in their hair” locked in combat “on a woman’s stairs.” This vignette captures the city’s working-class foundations and the complicated dynamics within community spaces where private conflicts become public spectacle.

Throughout the track, relationships dissolve almost as quickly as they form. When the narrator laments finding only love “that lasts a month or two then it’s gone,” the delivery conveys both disappointment and resignation. The repeated chorus where a lover declares “You don’t love me/The way you ought to do” serves as the song’s emotional pivot point, highlighting the disconnect between urban proximity and genuine connection.

Most striking is the recurring request to “set my body on fire”—first from a frustrated lover, then seemingly from the narrator himself—suggesting both erotic desire and self-immolation as potential escapes from urban ennui.

“In The City” ultimately succeeds as both a love letter and farewell to Leeds, capturing that precise moment when a chapter closes—not with dramatic finality but with quiet recognition that one’s emotional geography has irreversibly shifted toward new coordinates.