Two Shell’s Trick Mirror
On the UK dance-music pranksters’ debut album, sincerity and irony are like two nearly identical reflections.
Some artists who avoid press photos and don shadowy pseudonyms are trying to create an absence where their real identity would otherwise go, leaving their music as the sole focus. (I imagine that Burial, whose public profile in recent years has remained about as low as before he released The Selfie, would have been just as happy to remain faceless forever.) Others fill the absence with colorful masks and elaborate mythologies, not so much abandoning identity as constructing a compelling new one. Both approaches can be fruitful—in an industry so obsessed with image and personality, why not claim those territories for your art?—but their aims are divergent. One draws you toward the sound; the other toward the pseudonymity itself.
In truth, as with most things, it’s a spectrum, not a dichotomy. Two Shell, over the course of their brief and often thrilling career, have been moving from one end of that spectrum to the other. The UK dance-music it-boys’ sound has expanded from the twitchy spareness of their DJ-oriented early releases to encompass mangled vocal hooks, syrupy pop chord progressions, post-ironic trance leads, and whatever the hell else they feel like throwing in. As their palette has grown, so too has their appetite for extramusical hijinks. Hardly an article gets written about them without mentioning the epic troll of their Boiler Room appearance, which involved a pre-recorded set and two masked performers who might have been decoys. At this point, you may be as likely to know them for selling rocks for £1,000 each on Bandcamp (they turned out to contain USB drives with new music) as for making one of the best tracks of the 2020s.
For better or worse, the men behind the music seem more interested in centering their puckish personas rather than sidelining them. So after they finally gave an interview and face reveal to Mixmag this summer—in which they couldn’t stop talking about the “mind virus,” and “guys like us” who “don’t let the matrix control them,” and the “wo-mainstreamers” they’re trying to appeal to with their more vocal-centric tracks—it seems reasonable to take such a swirl of vaguely reactionary signifiers into account when considering their music. By their own design, the knucklehead stuff feels like part of the whole Two Shell experience, not some separate thing.
Their self-titled debut album, which comes after a string of EPs and singles, opens with an ominous choral synth patch and a robotic voice gravely intoning: “They say in our time we will destroy us/They breathe, they breathe into the terror.” (That’s the best I can discern: Like many of the voices or syntheses thereof on this album—and there are a lot of them—this one comes in and out of strict legibility.) It sounds like the beginning to a ponderous album with important things to say about society, which would be out of character for Two Shell, and is fortunately not the case, at least not so overtly. It’s followed by “Come to Terms,” a cybernetic house track with a pensive buildup and a mildly unsettling refrain: “Come to terms, come to terms with the truth of it/Come to terms, come to terms with the real shit.” It’s not a bad tune, but I can’t help but wonder about this ominous real shit that I’m supposed to be coming to terms with.
Two Shell are still virtuosic producers who approach their tracks with fanatical attention to detail. When they turn all their knobs in the direction of an adrenaline rush—as in the thunderous bass that arrives halfway through “Rock Solid”’s percussive clatter, the storm of drum’n’bass breaks and sample chops in “Gimmi It,” or the bouncy half-time breakdown of “Be Somebody”—the results are undeniably great. When they’re on, these two are among the most exciting producers in the world, which makes the more off-putting aspects of their whole deal especially frustrating, and worth reckoning with. You’d be foolish to write the duo off altogether.
The album consists almost entirely of anthems-in-waiting, filled with the tickly vocal hooks that have become one of Two Shell’s signature sounds. Even when the lyrics are not particularly emotional, as on the fist-pumping single “Everybody Worldwide,” the sparkling synth tones and dramatic chords bring to mind the unguarded feeling and big-room ambition of power ballads and pop-trance singalongs. Two Shell’s tendency to swing for the fences can get a little samey over Two Shell’s 45 minutes, and the pomp and bluster of its biggest moments might make you wonder whether apparently earnest feeling is just another private joke. The constant chatter of its omnipresent vocal samples can also be distracting, giving the sense that whatever Two Shell want to tell you is more important than making you move. But at their best, these qualities give the music a strain of yearning vulnerability that runs alongside and just a little beneath all the swaggering and hectoring.
“Hurt Somebody,” one of the album’s emotional centers, plays like a populist refashioning of prime-era Burial, setting its moonlit R&B sample chops against twirling marimba arpeggios instead of howling negative space. Curiously, though the song appeared on promotional advances and preorder links, it was missing from Two Shell on release day, and still is at the time of this writing. (A rep told me it will be back eventually—sample clearance issues, apparently, though who knows with these two.) The original tracklist was clearly setting “Hurt Somebody” up in dialogue with “Be Gentle With Me,” the following track, which is still there. The former, coiled and nocturnal, is built around a chorus of “Can I really hurt somebody?”; the latter, with more spring in its step and brightness in its arrangement, opens into a scrambled bridge that goes “I’ve been hurt, I’ve been hurt, I’m hurt, I’m really hurting.” (It might even be the same guy singing.) The pairing feels like a journey from solipsism to empathy—and, in the production, from black-and-white to technicolor. If learning to feel for others means a little pain of your own along the way, the joyful groove of “Be Gentle With Me” suggests the hurt is worth it.
Two Shell’s seven-minute closer, “Mirror,” is more bombastic in its quest for appeal: a refrain that hardly ever lets up, a spoken-word section that comes off like a self-help tape, a soft-rock piano break, and a 150-bpm pulse that feels like too many uppers, euphoric and addled at once. Much like Two Shell’s offstage antics, it seems primarily concerned with keeping your attention on Two Shell. “I never knew what I had till I looked in the mirror,” goes the vocal sample in the track’s first half. What you see in the mirror, of course, is yourself. In the second half, the track breaks down and rebuilds itself, and the refrain changes, now perhaps assessing the image in the reflection. “I like it,” the digitized voice sings over and over.
On the gorgeous “Dreamcast,” a sleeper candidate for the album’s most affecting track, Two Shell offer only a ghostly suggestion of catharsis. Giant sawtooth lead lines keep revving up and then sputtering out; hand percussion pitter-patters like it might do at the edges of a disco floor-filler, but here it’s alone at center stage. The subtle and tender music carries no whiff of cynicism or pandering to anyone’s idea of the mainstream, real or imagined, wo- or otherwise. It makes me hopeful that Two Shell really mean it, on some level: that the pervasive irony in their music does not preclude a desire to actually connect with listeners, and what looks like narcissism might be a mask for more complicated feelings. Even their comment about the “mind virus” reads to me like a misguided attempt to make sense of an alienating world and define yourself with a little dignity, a sentiment I can relate to even though I reject the worldview implied by that loaded idiom. “Look in the mirror and tell yourself you’re actually sick,” they say in the same interview, “and things will be fine.”
