B-Side Guys

The most devastating separations often occur under the same roof. On “Spare Room,” the lead single from Boston trio Constellation Myths’ sophomore album The Cost of Living, physical proximity only magnifies emotional distance as a relationship crumbles into geometric patterns of avoidance and resignation.

“I guess, I guess she up and left/I hardly notice since I sleep up here,” vocalist Molly Seamans declares in the opening lines, establishing both narrative and emotional territory with unnerving efficiency. What follows is a masterclass in understated devastation, chronicling a marriage’s dissolution through the lens of physical space—specifically, “the room above the garage/Where the in-laws slept on holidays.” This once-temporary accommodation becomes permanent exile, a “set piece of my former life/Moldering just fifty feet away.”

Musically, the track delivers on the band’s self-description as “damaged Alt-Country.” Acoustic guitar alternates between strumming and picking patterns that create a deceptive country swing beneath the narrative, while Justin Kehoe’s strong backbeat provides the rhythmic foundation. What begins as folk simplicity gradually accumulates complexity, building toward a cathartic finale featuring layered vocal harmonies sung in round, driving banjo, and what the band aptly describes as “nervy, overdriven pedal steel.”

This instrumental evolution mirrors the song’s examination of identity calcification. When confronted with “You got weird on me,” the narrator counters with the album’s most chilling line: “I’m who I always was.” This simple declaration functions as both defense mechanism and damning admission—suggesting that perhaps the relationship’s failure was inevitable, encoded from the beginning but only revealed through time’s passage.

Where many bands might center the drama of separation—shouting matches, thrown objects, slammed doors—Constellation Myths focuses instead on the quietly devastating aftermath, where former partners occupy separate planets within the same solar system. The narrator’s new domain is clinically described: “the granny flat” with “the half bath and the mini fridge” where they “work and sleep for days and days.” The final question—”What more could I need?”—reads as either stubborn defiance or profound delusion.

As the opening statement for an album that “turns its gaze outward” to examine “class resentments, petty jealousies, false prophets,” and “the warping of our shared sense of reality,” “Spare Room” suggests that Constellation Myths understands how personal disintegration often precedes and mirrors societal fracture. From their vantage point in the space above the garage, they’ve crafted a compelling vantage point to survey the landscape of contemporary American dissolution.