B-Side Guys

Christopher Pappas describes ‘Hot Little Daggers’ as a love song that favors tension over release, and the track earns that description by never once reaching for the exit. The track doesn’t resolve the discomfort of being too close to someone who is bad for you in the specific way that feels exactly right. It just keeps driving around with nowhere to go, which is also what the narrator is literally doing in the second verse.

Pappas built Elle Belle from a songwriting practice that has taken him from a cult following in Boston to writing for NASA to assembling a 27-piece orchestra for original works in Los Angeles. That range shows in how “Hot Little Daggers” carries more structural weight than its slow-burn surface suggests. The layered vocals Pappas mentions are intimate without being fragile, which is a precise distinction: fragile vocals ask for gentleness, intimate ones ask you to lean in. The difference is who’s in control of the dynamic.

The lyric “you’re pretty dirty for a Catholic girl” announces the song’s central tension in the first line, the collision of guilt and attraction that makes the metaphor of daggers feel accurate rather than dramatic. Ms. Sullivan keeps the whole thing grounded in something specific and slightly illicit, a name rather than a type.

Signed to Little Record Company through his connection to Rilo Kiley’s Pierre de Reeder, and playing the first Sunday of every month at The Fable in Eagle Rock, Pappas has built Elle Belle into something with genuine staying power. A song this comfortable, sitting in discomfort, is the proof.