Back in 2011, Nine Black Alps’ website looked like this. If you click on that link and scroll down a little, you can see that the band allowed you to stream their albums, 2005’s Everything Is and Love/Hate from 2007, as well as their whole catalogue of B-sides and a collection of their demos. Why I was on their website at the time, I can’t remember. But what I can say for sure is through launching the audio player under the ‘B-sides’ section, their inclusion being due to “public demand”, I came to know the subject of today’s post. ‘Strangest Feeling’ was a B-side released on a specific vinyl release of the ‘Burn Faster’ single. Strange that it was released only on vinyl, yet it’s available to listen to on streaming services. That’s not usually how things go. But in 2011, when I was 16 and already a big Nine Black Alps follower, finding these “new” songs felt like stumbling upon a gold mine.

‘Strangest Feeling’ was a tune I got into right away. Got a vivid memory of singing it loud in the bathroom while looking at myself in the mirror and brushing my teeth in the morning. Songwriter and guitarist Sam Forrest takes on the point of view of someone who becomes a family man. In his words, “[finds] a house and a wife and started breeding”. But this situation’s only really described in the first verse, with the second being a kind of list of contradictory statements, “I’m not coming up, I’m going down”, “I’m ecstatic, there’s no feeling,” et cetera, et cetera. A bit of a mish-mash of themes going on in this song. It may seem like a bit of a writing exercise in that case, and maybe that’s why it was considered a B-side rather than a number that could be considered album-worthy. But its hooky guitar riff and multitude of melodic points have always stood out to me. Like ‘So in Love’, there’s something very ’90s about the whole thing. In fact, this to me sounds more Nirvana than anything from Everything Is.

Ever since hearing it all that time ago, I’ve always thought of it as a really well-delivered, concise pop-rock tune. Poppy by Nine Black Alps standards. The Love/Hate era of the band was one in which Sam Forrest wanted to focus more on a melodic approach to his songwriting and performance, as opposed to the intense, straight-up hard rock found on predecessor Everything Is. It was a change that didn’t work so well, at least not to me, and Forrest has gone on to say that some songs on the album strayed from what he had envisioned. Had they taken those songs off and replaced them with the B-sides such as ‘Destination Nowhere’, ‘Daytime Habit’, ‘Heartstring’ and, obviously, ‘Strangest Feeling’, I think we all would have had a much stronger album on our hands. Always a shame when things don’t always work out the way we want them to.