B-Side Guys

The origin story here is genuinely good: guitarist Steve Arm had a riff he’d been playing for years, never titled, never written down, but always accompanied by the same opening line about acid friends calling while someone’s mind is still unthawing. Allisyn Snyder heard it as a kid, long before she’d tried drugs, and spent years imagining what that particular thaw would feel like. “Acid Friends” is what happened when the image finally had a full song to live in.

Sensor Noise is Allisyn and her husband, Dylan Snyder, both Disney Channel alumni, alongside Arm, a film composer and member of indie rock outfit Pistol For Ringo. The entertainment industry background is less a novelty than it is a practical asset: the band shoots their own visuals and approaches songwriting with the kind of structural awareness that comes from people who think in scenes.

The song earns it. The narrator is adrift in a specific way, disconnecting the phone, walking the block, looking for anything that sparks a memory, waiting in line for a scratch-off ticket. These aren’t abstract images of dissociation. They’re a Tuesday afternoon in the wrong headspace. A street preacher shouts from a boom box that days are running out, which is either cosmic urgency or background noise, and the song is smart enough not to decide which.

“Keep on going but don’t go too far” lands as the chorus refrain, and it’s the kind of advice that sounds simple until you’re the one who needs it, standing on a corner five dollars short of cigarettes, trying to remember what day it is.