- The notorious tricksters bet big on sincerity for their debut full-length.
- Some artists aren't content to just make music; they want to be mythmakers. The Beatles and David Bowie built successions of personae across various records, music videos and films. The early aughts saw the rise of Gorillaz, an almost entirely virtual "band." Later, the Internet’s infinite canvas enabled acts like iamamiwhoami to construct easter eggs around their veiled identities. Intentions behind these meta-narratives vary: K-pop executives intentionally conspire to keep fans invested in groups like BTS by immersing them in convoluted lore, while Daft Punk's exposition of their music and characters in filmic projects like Interstella 5555 served to foster heartfelt epics about the tension between human and machine.
Enter Two Shell, the anonymous (presumed) duo whose career began with fresh takes on UK bass that mutated into progressively stranger and more bombastic forms reminiscent of PC Music. Since finding global fame in 2021 with crunchy, pixelated jungle pop on "home," they've played festivals the world over and released widely praised EPs and singles that merge the staticky polyrhythms of Aphex Twin into hyper-hyperpop (think SOPHIE meets 100 gecs), with visual and sonic palettes evoking Y2K video games and the early web. This year, iconic UK girl group Sugababes re-recorded vocals from their hit 2002 track "Round Round" for Two Shell's "Round." The duo also helped FKA twigs usher in her new techno-indebted Eusexua era with "Talk To Me."
These official releases (primarily hosted, until this year, on their proprietary label Mainframe Audio) are just the tip of the iceberg. Fans who follow trails of digital breadcrumbs across the extended Two Shell universe have unlocked dozens of unreleased demos and tracks with unpronounceable titles, or ripped edits from genre-fucked DJ mixes that later disappeared. Laced with interruptions from robot voices like Siri, their work is bold, irreverent, fun and at times bewildering. Yet as with PC Music, reservoirs of ambivalent, even mournful emotion lurk beneath the silly sheen.
While they've made a name as innovators, some music heads have tired of the games. Two Shell (or their surrogates) have turned up to paid appearances shrouded in hokey get-ups to press play on pre-recorded sets. Their "interviews," like a 2022 text-only chat with The Face that has since been "destroyed," often seem to take the piss. In anticipation of their new album, their once-cryptic Instagram was seemingly taken over by their new label, Young, whose inane posting (seeming to parody typical label promo fodder) feels like yet another prank. If the point, as Two Shell themselves have suggested, is to subvert the idea of DJs as idols towering over someone else's music, they’ve accomplished quite the opposite. Instead, they've fostered a cult of personality around their carefully choreographed, well-funded mystique.
Emerging from this maximalist muddle, Two Shell's first album (self-titled, once you parse the ASCII symbols) is surprisingly, refreshingly and successfully clear. It contains few, if any, jokes or gags; while veering around hairpin turns of genres and tempos, it errs on the side of sincerity. Like much of Two Shell's work, it rewards close listening. What appear at first like festival-ready anthems contain, on the microscopic level of subtle shifts and hard-to-hear vocals, tender expressions of vulnerability. Their passage through extreme filters drive the feelings home. In the album's emotional arc, disembodied voices strive to move forward as the illusions around them come crashing down, exposing hidden wounds. After the album's opening track, a spoken word invocation, sets an apocalyptic tone, a voice on the soft-spoken "come to terms" croons. "Come to terms with the truth of it."
The ensuing journey mixes industrial and hardcore tendencies from the post-punk side of dance music with vocals that alternately whisper and shout. Softness and rage both become tools for emotional release. "[rock✧solid]" feels like a tantrum, with a breakdown of gnawing industrial gears overpowering Two Shell's standard riot of bass-heavy rhythms. Later, "₊˚⊹gimmi it" furthers the sense that they are pulling from punk, with a prominent drum break just barely ordering the moshpit-ready jungle madness. The track pushes the limits of how thoroughly a hyperpop vocal can be obliterated. Even lead single "Everybody Worldwide," whose simpler grooves makes it the record's surest big-room bop, feels bittersweet: over melancholic chords, the eponymous refrain feels less like a call to celebration and more like collective grief.
While hyperpop vox is often coded as girlish or androgynous, an undoubtedly male-coded voice takes centre stage for much of the record. It achingly admits on "be gentle with me" (a warm and relatively smooth, Overmono-like number): "I've been hurt / I'm really hurting." The record's gendered themes are underscored by Two Shell's extension of their meta-world in a recent facetious Mixmag interview. In emailed responses, they obsessively refer to themselves as a particular breed of "guys" and claim they worked with FKA twigs "so more chicks would be into our sound." Perhaps this pantomime was preparing us for the album's narrative, which unfolds like someone taking off virtual reality goggles to discover that he has wrought destruction on a world he mistook for a game.
That these lyrical admissions are half-obscured by overwhelming production feels part and parcel with the burden masculinity faces in unpacking itself: men aren't supposed to show emotion; they are supposed to be, as "Two Shell" says in that interview, "slick operators who love bass and don't think too much." The story seems built for a fast-paced yet reflective solo drive. On "Stars..," the male voice takes responsibility in a poppy yet earnest register: "I can take the blame, the pain, illusion." A female voice cuts in, crooning in French, becoming choppy and indecipherable: what the feminine has to say in response, we'll never quite know. A concluding arc culminates in "Mirror," a portrait of duality split into two sections with perhaps a dozen instruments and several voices crowding in. Peeling back these layers across repeated listens, one may find either a mess or a testament to human complexity. Either way, it's a fitting finale.
Sure, Two Shell have done the absolute most to make their project convoluted, confusing and perhaps even obnoxious. But what if the mission were less to titillate and tease, than to draw listeners close to hear a guarded secret—a vulnerability that shouldn't exist? In a piece for blog No Bells, writer Nathan Evans reflected that the inaccessibility of output by Two Shell and underground internet label CloudCore serves to re-capture some of the "intimacy and sense of community" that club music lost when it went mainstream. Scarce, precious dubplates have given way to universally available downloads. Those committed enough to crack Two Shell's codes are rewarded with entry to a "slowly-expanding circle," rather than a vast, faceless fandom.
For the rest of us, the music that makes it to Two Shell's Bandcamp and Spotify serves as their face to the world. Much of their antics are literally self-effacing; we don’t know how much was ever meant to stick. Like their Instagram, they cleaned the slate to serve something more complete, a narrative that connects to their larger parodic project. The hardness of the music, growing ever less carefree, seems to channel emotions that can't always be expressed in words, and process something too big to grasp—or release—in one go.
Tracklist01.
02. come to terms
03. (rock✧solid)
04. be gentle with me
05. ({~_-})
06. Everybody Worldwide
07. ₊˚⊹gimmi it
08. /inside//
09. dreamcast
10. Stars...
11. be somebody
12. Mad Powers
13. Mirror