B-Side Guys

Christopher Pappas opens “New Sins” with a taunt—”Go on and hate me, but I’m still right”—and spends the rest of the track defending a love so combustible it “blew up your life.” This isn’t an apology; it’s provocation. Elle Belle’s latest single tackles what Pappas calls “traditions, rituals, and inheritance” by treating all three as obstacles to happiness rather than foundations for it.

The production sharpens the message. Pappas recorded the guitar and bass through an old Fostex 4-track cassette recorder he found in his closet, giving the track a deliberately degraded quality that mirrors the lyrical content about rejecting clean lineage. When he sings “ask what the word for when you let dead people tell you what to do,” it’s not rhetorical—he genuinely wants to name the phenomenon of letting inheritance calcify into prison. The answer he offers is simple: “She’s old news.”

The most cutting moment arrives when the narrator tells his partner to inform her mother, “I’m sorry that you’re happier than her.” It’s the kind of line that pretends to be conciliatory while twisting the knife deeper, acknowledging generational unhappiness as the real tradition being passed down. “New sins” becomes the remedy, a catalog of transgressions designed specifically to break that cycle.

Pappas—who’s written for NASA, assembled 27-piece orchestras, and developed an off-Broadway-bound musical—keeps Elle Belle stripped down by comparison. The lo-fi cassette sound and the song’s bare-bones arrangement feel intentional for an artist capable of orchestral grandeur. Sometimes the most radical act is refusing to dress up your rebellion in unnecessary pageantry. “We don’t need saving,” he insists in the outro. “It’s you and me baby.” The sins aren’t new because they’ve never been committed before—they’re new because this time, nobody’s asking permission from the dead.