B-Side Guys

“Darling the word is elastic, it owns.” That line arrives late in “Uncanny” and does something most gothic rock doesn’t bother with: it turns the concept back on itself. The uncanny isn’t just the subject of the song. It’s the method.

Lee Rose has described the track as an exorcism of the online persona she’s built promoting Ace of Wands, a self that seeks validation through perfectionism and public recognition. That’s a precise diagnosis, and the song is structured to enact it rather than just describe it. The composition moves in distinct classical movements, contrasting rhythms pulling against a propulsive violin line while sawtooth bass and thunderous drums build underneath. The arrangement doesn’t settle. It keeps introducing new pressures, which is exactly what the doppelgänger dynamic requires.

The lyric works through repetition as accumulation. “Feeling dead” opens the song as a flat statement and cycles back repeatedly until the bridge reframes it entirely: “recognize, not human / feel alone, feel the blood rushing.” The “she” that takes over mid-song is the uncanny self, the public-facing persona observed from outside. By the final section, “she’s dead” lands not as tragedy but as resolution. The exorcism completes.

What Rose does with the Freudian concept, the familiar rendered strange, is apply it to something Freud couldn’t have theorized: the constructed self that social media demands. “The uncanny self, she was meant to be hurt” is the song’s coldest line, and the one that sticks. The classical training and the gothic horror fandom turn out to want the same thing from this material.