B-Side Guys

The Gromble recorded “Vicious” with 12-string acoustics and Mellotron flutes, aiming for the warm, driving energy of classic pop, and then ran the whole thing through a tape machine with tracking errors until the melodies warped. That decision is the song’s central argument before a single lyric lands: the bright vintage textures and the uneasy edge aren’t fighting each other. One is how the other survives being heard.

Producer Jon Joseph, who has worked with Børns and illuminati hotties, helped the band calibrate that balance between surface charm and honest content, and it holds throughout. The opening image, “eye to eye with her hands on my throat” delivered over acoustic warmth and Mellotron flutes, establishes the approach immediately. The cartoony production doesn’t undercut the violence of the moment. It makes it possible to look at directly.

The lyric is autobiographical and blunt in the way the band intended: a snapshot of the specific moment a relationship turns venomous and both parties become complicit in it. “Though I never mean to hurt you / I know it’s all that I do” is the chorus’s honest accounting, and the word “vicious” gets applied to the dynamic rather than to either person specifically, which is the more accurate diagnosis. Justine Dorsey’s backing vocals add a layer that keeps the narrator from being too comfortably in the right.

“I’ve become something I’m not / something wicked baby” arrives at the bridge and names the transformation the whole song has been circling. The tape machine artifacts around it, the wobble in the playback, feel less like a production choice at that point and more like the sound of someone watching themselves become someone they don’t recognize, the music doing what the lyric just said.