B-Side Guys

Ryan Gross picks up his partner’s abandoned phone while she showers, documenting the precise moment when curiosity becomes violation. “I Just Can’t Help Feeling Curious” captures relationship paranoia through specific behavioral details rather than abstract emotional declarations, turning everyday domestic moments into evidence of deeper instability. The Brooklyn-based artist’s Maine coastal background provides necessary distance from urban neurosis, creating perspective that transforms personal anxiety into universal recognition.

His collaboration with TOLEDO’s Jordan Dunn-Pilz and Dan Alvarez creates production that serves the song’s voyeuristic themes through careful restraint. The arrangement builds tension through accumulation rather than force, with folky guitars providing deceptive comfort while synthesizer layers suggest underlying unease. The 2:29 drum machine climax mentioned arrives with surgical precision, transforming passive observation into active confrontation exactly when the emotional pressure demands release.

Gross’s lyrical construction operates through intimate specificity that makes relationship decay feel uncomfortably familiar. The progression from “curious” to “furious” within identical chorus structures captures how suspicion transforms rational inquiry into emotional violence. When he describes wanting to “dig in your teeth and drag your nails across my back,” the imagery suggests someone seeking physical pain as substitute for emotional clarity—intimacy replaced by intensity when trust becomes unavailable.

His vocal performance embodies the exhausted paranoia of someone who has crossed boundaries they can’t uncross. The delivery starts quietly, reflecting the stealth required for successful snooping, before building to climactic confrontation that feels both inevitable and self-destructive. The progression mirrors the emotional arc of relationship surveillance—initial secrecy giving way to explosive revelation.

“I Just Can’t Help Feeling Curious” functions as both confession and warning, documenting how ordinary domestic doubt can metastasize into relationship-ending behavior. Gross has created something that acknowledges the seductive power of investigation while refusing to romanticize its consequences. The track suggests that certain forms of knowledge, once acquired, make continued intimacy impossible—curiosity satisfied at the cost of everything it sought to preserve.