In his recent single “The Devil Next Door,” North Carolina singer-songwriter Steven Hicks offers a spine-tingling meditation on paranoia, the politics of division, and the unnerving power of our projections. Sparse, eerie, and devastatingly timely, the track wields a scalpel on the American psyche, and what Hicks finds beneath is both darkly satirical and all too close to home.
Beginning with a crawling, skeletal arrangement that lets every word stab through, Hicks slips on the skin of the song’s narrator, a man slowly peeling apart his own life in suspicion. His neighbor is polite, uninteresting, and perhaps even friendly, but that doesn’t prevent the protagonist from sinking into fantasies of threat and betrayal. The brilliance of “The Devil Next Door” is that it doesn’t flinch. The words land like soft grenades, condemning the corrosive effects of echo chambers and the paranoia of the 24-hour news cycle hawks. Hicks isn’t simply telling the tale of one man’s descent. Instead, he’s turning the mirror on a society at ideological war, where fear of the other simmers just beneath the surface of picket fences and friendly waves.
Rather than preach, Hicks pokes. His songwriting doesn’t provide tidy answers. It raises questions and challenges listeners to sit with discomfort. It simmers and eventually boils over in a climax that’s a tragic, terrifying blur of satire and psychological realism. You might smile at how the narrator’s fears are until you don’t because they sound so familiar.
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