B-Side Guys

Repetition as reassurance, repetition as warning. My Girls’ “In Place” turns the phrase “everything in its place” into something between mantra and cage, examining how the appearance of order can become its own kind of trap. The Tucson duo of Lydia and Aaron—who started recording in Aaron’s casita in 2023—have crafted an atmospheric meditation on the gap between surface-level fine and actual well-being.

The production leans heavily into shoegaze’s immersive textures, building layers of sound that feel simultaneously enveloping and claustrophobic. It’s the perfect sonic approach for lyrics that question whether smiles mean what they’re supposed to mean, whether houses tell truth or lies, whether being face to face with yourself in the mirror reveals or obscures. The dream pop influence softens the edges without diminishing the underlying unease, creating that peculiar emotional state where everything feels beautiful and wrong at once.

What’s striking is how the song articulates the desire to escape physical reality—”I’d rather stay in your bones than these bones”—while simultaneously fearing any kind of ending. The parenthetical contradictions pile up: not wanting to stay, not wanting to leave, just wanting to be. It’s the emotional paralysis of knowing something’s off but lacking the clarity or courage to name it, much less change it. When Lydia and Aaron sing about wanting flesh to be shared flesh again, about bringing back the unknown, there’s a longing for a version of intimacy that existed before everything got sorted into its proper place.

The final section hammers home the central irony: the insistence that having “a place for everything” must mean being OK becomes less convincing with each repetition. It’s organizational logic applied to emotional chaos, a desperate attempt to convince yourself that external order equals internal peace. The atmospheric production enhances this effect—all that reverb and texture creating space for these uncomfortable truths to float and linger rather than land cleanly.

For a band that started barely two years ago, My Girls have already found their emotional frequency. They understand that shoegaze’s wall of sound can be used not just for beauty but for examining the ways we wall ourselves off from uncomfortable realities. “In Place” doesn’t resolve its tensions because those tensions can’t be resolved—not by arrangement, not by repetition, not by insisting everything must be OK.