B-Side Guys

“Where’s Pete? Where’s Pete?!” The question lands in the middle of “Tails” like someone looking up from the table and realizing the most alive person in the room has already left. Dutch indie duo In Loom build their second single around that specific loss: not death, not distance, but the fading of a particular kind of energy. The kind that doesn’t know it’s finite.

At one minute and forty-five seconds, “Tails” has no room for anything that doesn’t pull weight. Gijs and Sander, who’ve been playing together for over two decades under various names, distill the whole thing to bass and guitar and a lyric that moves through Peter Rabbit, pirates, and “long tall and cinnamon Sally” with the associative logic of someone rifling through old photographs. The salad days. The valley. Back to zero. The imagery is loose enough to feel personal without being locked to any single reading.

The chorus question is the one that sticks: “Why do we bruise? Why did we lose our tails?” Tails as youth’s remnant, the thing you shed without noticing until it’s gone. The bruising is harder to explain: the sensitivity that comes with still caring about things most people have stopped caring about.

Written with someone specific in mind who never seemed to outgrow that restless energy, the song functions as a small elegy. The tempo won’t let you sit with it too long, which is probably right.