B-Side Guys

Kansas City’s Parent’s Room builds their shoegaze around a disturbing proposition: what if feeling nothing actually feels better than feeling everything? “Vertigo Smile” examines the seductive quality of emotional anesthesia without romanticizing or condemning it—just documenting how numbness can masquerade as peace when the alternative is constant pain.

“Why’s the poison taste better than the medicine?” The question drives the entire track, repeated until it becomes less inquiry and more statement of fact. Their approach to this dangerous territory avoids both recovery rhetoric and addiction glamorization, instead presenting numbness as rational response to overwhelming input. Sometimes the cure really does taste worse than the disease.

The band’s commitment to volume serves their thematic content perfectly. Their “loud is allowed” philosophy creates sonic environment where clarity becomes impossible—exactly the state their protagonist seeks. Rather than fighting against the wall of sound, they use it as metaphor for the kind of sensory overload that makes numbness feel like relief rather than symptom.

Their examination of “bitter contentment” captures something essential about depression that therapy culture often misses—sometimes people choose numbness not because they’re sick but because they’re tired of being oversensitive in an insensitive world. Parent’s Room presents this choice without judgment, allowing listeners to recognize their own relationship with emotional avoidance.

The track’s repetitive structure mirrors the cyclical nature of the behavior it describes. Each return to the central question feels less like obsession and more like scientific inquiry—testing the same hypothesis repeatedly to see if the results change. They never do, but the testing continues anyway, because sometimes the process of questioning becomes more important than finding answers.