Sin Triangle

Some songs announce their subject in the title. This one does the opposite. A listener who sees the words Sin Triangle might brace for trigonometry, or for a sermon, or for a story of infidelity. One reviewer admitted guessing along exactly those lines, then said they were happily wrong about all of it.^[2] The song is a tangle of references that behaves like a pop song and thinks like a puzzle box.

It sits second on No Dogs Allowed, the album Sidney Gish self-released on the last day of 2017.^[6][7] Over four and a half minutes it manages to be a sincere confession, a joke at its own expense and a very catchy piece of power pop. That balancing act is the whole reason it has outlived its moment.

A bedroom record made in a hurry

Gish was a student at Northeastern University in Boston when the album appeared, studying the music industry and learning how to run a career as well as write songs.^[3][6] She recorded the album alone, producing, writing and mixing it herself, mostly in Logic.^[4] The perfectionism that came with working solo was a problem as well as a method. She has said self-criticism made it hard to finish things early on, and she described the central theme of the album as her rushing to complete it.^[4]

That context matters for this song. The record was assembled by someone toggling between coursework, internships and a laptop, and it sounds like a mind that never quite stops multitasking. A Stanford Daily review heard in it the anxious, lonely texture of growing up online, with a precise, meticulous sound that reflected the solitude of its making.^[1]

Gish herself picked this track as a favorite from the record, and noted she had been performing it for a long time before the album came out.^[3] It was not a throwaway written to fill out a tracklist. It was a song she had lived with, refined and road-tested.

A song built from mismatched parts

The reviewer at the Stanford Daily describes the track as a collision of trigonometry, Japanese isolationism and a sample from a 1950s educational film about personality, all resting on a sturdy songwriting foundation and capped with a power pop guitar solo.^[1] It is hard to think of another pop song that would ask a listener to keep those four things in mind at once.

The sample is the most revealing choice. Mid-century educational films tried to explain how to become a well-adjusted person, as if character were a procedure with correct steps. Placing that cheerful, authoritative voice inside a song about messy private feeling sets up a quiet irony. The film promises that people can be sorted and understood. The song keeps finding that they cannot.

The trigonometry works in a similar way. Geometry offers clean relationships between points, angles that always add up. A love triangle, or a triangle of guilt, offers none of that comfort. The song seems to enjoy borrowing the vocabulary of precision to describe an emotional situation that refuses to behave. That is my reading rather than a stated intention, but it is consistent with how the song is built, and with Gish's reputation for turning academic or technical language into emotional shorthand.

Isolation as a recurring shape

The reference to Japanese isolationism is the stranger puzzle piece, and it points to one of the song's more persuasive themes. A country sealing its borders to protect itself from outside influence is a vivid image for a person who does the same with their feelings. Closing the door can feel like safety, and it can also be a way of avoiding every difficult conversation.

Read this way, the title stops being a riddle and becomes a description of a position. A triangle is the shape of three parties who cannot quite reach one another directly. Sin suggests the guilt that keeps them apart. The narrator is caught between wanting connection and a habit of self-protection, and the song looks for a way to say so without ever sounding mournful.

That tone is central. Reviewers of the album keep coming back to the combination of wit and unease. Jalopnik called the song a near-perfect pop song, an earworm that is supremely clever and balanced between the sincere and the silly.^[2] A joke here is never merely a joke. It is a way of getting close to something that would be unbearable if delivered straight.

Humor as a defense

Gish's songwriting often turns on this idea. Wordplay and absurd detail keep an anxious voice from collapsing into self-pity, while the real feeling leaks through at the edges. The Stanford Daily review called the album rewarding on repeated listens, with light humor that still examines modern anxieties.^[1] This song is a compact demonstration.

There is also a craft argument underneath the cleverness. Gish has said she tends to write melodies first and then fit the words to them, using placeholder syllables at the start.^[3] Songs made that way can sound unusually musical, with the wordplay serving the hook instead of the other way around. It helps explain why a song stuffed with references still reads as a pop single.

The guitar solo deserves its own mention. In a track so crowded with ideas, a short burst of old-fashioned power pop guitar acts as a release valve. It lets the listener stop decoding and simply enjoy the thing. That generosity, a refusal to make cleverness a barrier, is a large part of why people with no interest in puzzles love the song.

It also helps to remember what the title does before a single note plays. Most songs about guilt announce a mood. This one announces a worksheet. The title invites the listener to solve something, and the song then supplies a lot of material that feels like it should add up to an answer, without ever handing over a tidy proof. That teasing quality is a form of intimacy, because it treats the audience as a collaborator.

It is worth noting how rare that is in a debut-era indie record. Many young songwriters either hide their feelings behind irony or drop the irony entirely and confess. Gish does both at once, and the seam between the two modes is where the song lives. The humor does not undercut the feeling. It makes room for it.

Why it resonates

The album arrived at a particular cultural moment. Gish's early audience was found through Bandcamp and the DIY scene, then widened quickly. Pitchfork gave the album 7.7, The Fader and The Guardian praised it, and it won Album of the Year at the 2018 Boston Music Awards.^[6] NPR named her one of its Slingshot Artists to Watch for 2018^[3], and she toured as an opener for Mitski.^[4][5]

What listeners seemed to recognize was a voice that sounded like their own inner monologue: quick, funny, overeducated, a little afraid. The song's habit of juggling unrelated bodies of knowledge feels native to anyone who has spent years absorbing the internet. The Stanford Daily tied the album to exactly that hyper-connected sensibility.^[1]

In May 2019 Gish released an official video for the song.^[6][8] It extended the life of a track that had already been circulating for well over a year in live sets and radio sessions, and it gave listeners a face to put to a record that had been made entirely by one person.

Other ways to hear it

Because the song declines to say plainly what it is about, several readings are open. One hears it as a literal love triangle, with the academic vocabulary as comic cover for jealousy and guilt. Another hears it as religious, with sin and its geometry standing in for a childhood moral education that no longer fits. The reviewer who guessed at both trigonometry and religious dogma was reacting to exactly this double pull.^[2]

A third reading treats the song as being about self-presentation. The personality film suggests that identity is something people perform correctly or incorrectly. A young adult on the cusp of professional life, trying to appear stable, might feel the force of that. On this reading the triangle is the gap between who a person is, who they pretend to be and who they think they are supposed to be.

None of these needs to cancel the others. The song is built so that each reading is partly true, and the pleasure comes from how they overlap.

A small masterpiece of nervous energy

Sin Triangle rewards the listener who wants to look things up and the one who just wants to sing along. It treats knowledge as a toy and guilt as a real weight, and it never lets either one win. For a record made alone, in a rush, by a student, it sounds remarkably sure of itself.

Years later, the song still feels like a good entry point to Gish's whole project: a restless intelligence using jokes, hooks and strange facts to get at feelings that are hard to name directly. It is a reminder that anxiety can be funny and that being funny can still be a way of being honest.