B-Side Guys

The song opens on a gorgeous, windless hunting day before it becomes a tragedy, and that setup is doing real work. The beauty of the scene in the Inuktitut verses, “ᓯᓚᑦᓯᐊᕌᐱᒻᒥ, ᐊᓄᕆᖕᖏᑐᒥ” (“it was a beautiful day without wind”), makes the accidental shot that kills Kumainnaq’s son feel genuinely arbitrary. Nothing was wrong. Then everything was.

Beatrice Deer draws on a specific Inuit legend for the song: Aukkauti’s rifle fires by accident during a fowl hunt, setting off a cycle of grief and retaliation that ultimately kills him too. It’s a story about how tragedy compounds, how a single moment of bad luck becomes a blood feud through the logic of justice and loss. Deer, who is half-Inuk and half-Mohawk and was raised in the small Nunavik village of Quaqtaq, carries this material as inherited knowledge, and the album it comes from, Inuit Legend, is built around exactly that transmission.

The lyrics’ formal structure is the song’s real argument. “I didn’t wanna do it, I didn’t wanna” repeats across the full length of the track in both English and Inuktitut, cycling without resolution, which mirrors the story’s own logic: guilt that can’t be absorbed, grief that keeps generating more grief. By the second verse, the line shifts to “I didn’t wanna shoot him,” and the specificity sharpens the horror without dramatizing it.

The shoegaze production, buzzing synths and shimmering guitar beneath Deer’s soprano, holds the ancient material at exactly the right remove. The sound is modern enough that the legend doesn’t feel preserved in amber, but atmospheric enough that the weight of it comes through. Something happened on a beautiful day. The song is still trying to reckon with it.