B-Side Guys

“I’m gonna shine cause I’m feeling low” is a perfect encapsulation of performative healing—the worse you feel, the brighter you perform, the more people look at you while your “little ego is running free.” Marios Moutsos, frontman of Greek alternative rock band The Pigeonhole Project, uses his solo project Dislike Tonality to examine what he calls the “super ego and maybe the messiah complex,” though the song reads less ambiguous than he suggests. Produced by Ioannis Voudouris (former Rosebleed bassist), “Naive” appears on Until Empathy, released October 2025, and it’s essentially a catalog of every self-aggrandizing impulse that masquerades as altruism.

The musical arrangement mirrors the lyrical ego—guitars that demand attention, drums that insist on their own importance, Moutsos’s vocals delivered with the certainty of someone who’s “gonna heal your misfortuned race.” The second-person shift in “We’re naive” implicates both performer and audience in the delusion, acknowledging that the messiah complex requires complicity. People want answers “when no one did,” so they elevate whoever shows up with confidence, regardless of whether the confidence is earned. “Hail to the creep, looking for relief / Seems that he’s on his own” functions as both self-awareness and accusation—the creep is isolated precisely because his relief depends on others’ dependence.

What makes “Naive” effective is Moutsos’s willingness to inhabit the mindset completely. “I’m gonna hurt cause that’s all I know / I’m in a state of a mindless flow” could be confession or boast, probably both. The song doesn’t condemn the messiah complex from a distance; it performs it, demonstrates how easily grandiosity disguises itself as service. The final line—”The downfall”—arrives without elaboration, a promise or warning depending on whether you’re the creep or the congregation. Either way, Moutsos has documented the psychology with enough precision that discomfort feels like the appropriate response.