The single from Syracuse’s ORWAX, “Everything’s Addictive,” doesn’t so much ask a question as it does state a grim, unblinking diagnosis for the modern soul. From its first notes, the track establishes itself not as a party anthem for self-destruction, but as the sound of the machine humming underneath our choices. The trio—a self-contained unit of Ryan and Jim Moran, with Jason Randall on guitar and engineering duties—crafts a sound that feels both meticulously constructed and on the verge of coming loose.
This isn’t a song about a specific vice. It’s broader, more insidious. It’s about the addiction to emotional weather; the chase for the jolt of a new infatuation, the ache of a necessary heartbreak, or even just the pull of a feeling, any feeling, that’s more potent than the quiet hum of the everyday. It brings to mind the particular smell of an old library book—that faint, sweet decay of vanilla and paper. You know it’s just chemicals breaking down, but you lean in for another hit anyway, chasing a ghost of nostalgia. That’s the impulse this song nails.
The nervy, insistent churn of the guitars, driven by Jim Moran’s resolute drumming, creates a sense of propulsion toward a foregone conclusion. Ryan Moran delivers the song’s premise not as a preacher from a pulpit, but as a fellow patient in the waiting room, observing the collective twitch. It’s a recognition of the desperate human need to fill a space, and the track’s brilliance is in showing how we’ll use anything—wonderful, monstrous, or beautifully transient—as spackle for the void.
ORWAX has captured the mechanics of compulsion so well that the track becomes a minor obsession in itself, a perfect loop of diagnosis and symptom. Is it possible for a song about the desperate need to feel something to become the very thing you use to feel it?
