B-Side Guys

Harlee Case wrote “I Disappear” as a stream of consciousness during what she describes as “a really heavy time,” which explains why the track feels less like a song and more like documentation of a brain eating itself. The Portland indie-pop duo (Case on vocals, childhood friend Josh Smith on production) spent three years writing It Comes In Waves, their debut album arriving May 15 via Nettwerk. “I Disappear” functions as the album’s rawest moment, a meditation on anxiety and self-doubt that Case frames through the law of attraction turned against itself: “If I’m capable of controlling outcomes with my mind, then I’m fucked right now, because I’m stuck in this loop.”

That paradox drives the entire track. Case believes in manifestation, which means she also has to contend with the inverse: negative spiraling as self-fulfilling prophecy. “When you start to spiral about shit and get super in your head about something, you disappear from yourself and the present moment,” she explains. The production matches the lyrical claustrophobia, Smith layering synths that feel simultaneously expansive and suffocating. It’s ethereal dream-pop that sounds like a nightmare, energetic in tempo but moody in execution, the kind of sonic contradiction that mirrors trying to think your way out of anxious thoughts while knowing that thinking is the problem.

Smith and Case have known each other since childhood. He recorded her first songs in his bedroom when she was 14, then spent a decade touring the northwest while she built a community around female empowerment and plant medicine legalization. “I Disappear” benefits from that history, the production intimacy that comes from two people who’ve watched each other grow up. It Comes In Waves takes its title from the duo’s belief that life unfolds in cycles: grief and joy, heartbreak and renewal, all arriving in waves. “I Disappear” captures the undertow, that moment when the wave pulls you under, and you lose track of which way is up. Sometimes the most honest thing you can do is document the spiral without pretending you’ve found the exit.