B-Side Guys

Evan Hashi builds his love song around contradictions that refuse to resolve. “Modified Love Song” spins through images of sacred spaces and silver paper, figures bending and bowing, the past spinning about—creating a psychedelic swirl where wanting becomes indistinguishable from losing yourself entirely. The second single from Little Angry’s upcoming album Screamin’ Inside Your Heart!!! captures the Seattle multi-instrumentalist’s full-band form for the first time, bringing punk energy and psych-rock hypnotism to material that examines love as something closer to undoing than completion.

The production reflects the disorientation embedded in the lyrics. Dream pop textures blur into psychedelic rock without settling into either camp comfortably, matching the song’s exploration of desire that feels both necessary and destructive. Hashi’s work with The Hive Dwellers, Mega Bog, and Flying Circles prepared him for this kind of genre-mixing, but with The Sweets—longtime collaborators Jen Weisberg and Joe Kuta—there’s a sweat-covered enthusiasm that comes from people whose musical connection runs deep, playing songs they’ve spent years refining.

The lyrics move through increasingly urgent declarations of need: wanting to be loved, needing to be used, needing to be soothed and pruned to someone else’s rules. There’s a progression here from desire for connection to desire for dissolution, culminating in the admission of wanting to be lost to cruelty, wanting to be found inside flowers that haven’t bloomed yet. The imagery of triangulating mood, chewing the pencil end of doom, spooning the gold gong of truth—these aren’t coherent metaphors but fragments of psychological states, the kind of associative thinking that happens when feeling overwhelms logic.

Recorded in a steaming-hot shipping container studio in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, the album takes its title from COVID-era Japanese roller coaster instructions: “Please scream inside your heart.” For Hashi, the phrase captures the paradox of being a generationally-established immigrant musician in the United States—struggling against conditions that bring up intense feelings while being forced to repress them. That tension between internal intensity and external restraint runs through “Modified Love Song,” where all that wanting and needing and losing can’t quite find release.

Little Angry describes itself as a utopian music project attempting to create a tiny swirl of harmony within capitalism’s crushing dissonance and the music industry’s abuse. It’s an excuse to eat dinner with friends, bake bread, remember covers poorly. That communal spirit infuses the track with a particular kind of generosity even as the lyrics document dissolution—the sense that falling apart together is still a form of connection.