B-Side Guys

Borrowing the Hal Blaine “Be My Baby” drum pattern is a move that arrives loaded with associations, girl groups, Phil Spector’s wall of sound, a particular kind of swooning mid-60s romanticism. Goddamn Wolves use all of that and then write lyrics about artificial sweetener and a seller’s game and a city full of liars. The gap between the sound and what it’s carrying is where “Sugar Twin” does its best work.

The Raleigh band has always traded in that kind of tension, shared vocals between guitarist Chris Weilding and bassist Laura McCullough inviting comparisons to Pixies and X, bands whose pop instincts and darker impulses were never quite reconcilable. “Sugar Twin” is the third single to feature McCullough on lead vocals and writing duties, and her voice against those girl-group harmonies gives the sweetness a specific edge. The aspartame line, “they were sweet, but they taste like aspartame,” is the lyrical center of the track, an image that collapses romance, artificiality, and vague toxicity into a single word.

New guitarist Jon Trexler, who joined permanently after the band’s Replacements cover EP, gives the arrangement its textural density. The Jesus and Mary Chain influence is audible in how the guitars layer without quite resolving into clarity, which keeps the wall of sound from feeling nostalgic. It sounds distorted in the right way.

“Don’t tell them that you wanna be alone in your dreams” runs through the outro as both warning and permission, addressed to someone navigating the same seller’s game the verses described. The production makes it sound like a lullaby. That’s the whole trick.