B-Side Guys

Twenty-one-year-old Isabella Knight opens her debut EP with a song that refuses to flinch. “Carnivore” confronts domestic violence not through metaphorical distance but through visceral immediacy, transforming a home studio recording into something that feels dangerously intimate.

The track’s home-recorded quality works in its favor rather than against it. Knight’s vocals carry the rawness of someone speaking truths that haven’t been polished for public consumption. The instrumental arrangement—built with real instruments rather than programmed elements—maintains an organic tension that mirrors the psychological push-and-pull within the lyrics. Guitars hover between comfort and menace, while the rhythm section provides just enough stability to highlight how precarious everything else feels.

Knight’s lyrical construction reveals sophisticated understanding of psychological manipulation. The religious imagery—”scorching like hades in Jesus’ church”—creates deliberate cognitive dissonance, mixing sacred and profane in ways that reflect the confusion of abuse cycles. When she describes herself as a masochist with “a thirst for the hit,” she captures how trauma can rewire desire itself, making harm feel necessary rather than chosen.

The song’s most harrowing moment arrives in its final section, where the “carnivore” shadow towers before the narrator. This externalization of internal destruction—making the appetite for self-harm into a separate predatory entity—demonstrates Knight’s ability to give concrete form to abstract psychological states. The morning setting throughout these verses adds cruel irony: these revelations arrive with daylight, when clarity should bring comfort rather than terror.

What makes “Carnivore” essential rather than simply disturbing is Knight’s refusal to provide easy resolution. The song ends with fear acknowledged but not conquered, leaving listeners inside the experience rather than safely outside observing it. For a debut statement, it announces an artist unafraid to document the places others prefer to forget.