Ambiguity is Two Shell’s secret weapon, as a result of it makes you return, time and again, to determine what the hell they’re really doing. The push of “Doom Tradition” is brain-scrambling. Shrill synths and curdled basslines trace at aggression, however the inflexible kick and strangled vocal sound extra like a deeply abstracted ballroom bitch monitor. “⋆₊˚imaginative and prescient✧‧⁺˖⋆.” is slip-n-slide storage, threatening to careen uncontrolled as each sound is beveled and polished to a skeuomorphic sheen. The staggering “Darkish Shadow” sounds each brooding and cartoonish, invoking dubstep’s dentist-drill basslines with equal elements menace and humor, whereas the vocal captures the icky sensation of by accident chewing foil. These tracks are uncomfortable and uncanny—by no means only one factor at any given time—and you’ll hear in them the joy that the duo appeared to radiate in each path when it hit its stride round 2022.
The remainder of IIcons is extra predictable. The potential hit, “discovering my spirit,” tackles a home monitor head on the place Two Shell would normally zig-zag, with a vocal that feels unusually severe. It sounds a lot like a 4 Tet tune that it’s already related with 4 Tet, and it lacks the alien contours we search for in a Two Shell tune. Different tracks, like “eXist” and “Shifting Shadow,” are completely advantageous, although additionally they sound like pretty normal riffs on UK dance music, with out the weirdness or ugliness that makes the duo’s greatest music stick jaggedly in your mind.
Fortunate for us, Two Shell stay completely sick producers. It typically looks like they dreamed up new rare-earth components and tried to map them in sound—tender, onerous, metallic, plasticine, jiggy, unexpectedly—and so they’re nonetheless pushing the needle leftward. They make underground dance music extra pop-friendly, and the pop-friendly aspect of issues extra confrontational and foolish. However IIcons additionally exhibits us that for all their… iconoclasm… Two Shell are heading down a well-trodden path. Their authentic tactic of taking the piss out of DJ tradition doesn’t make as a lot sense now that they’re as well-liked and revered because the big-time selectors they as soon as poked enjoyable at. “The intention was by no means to troll,” they are saying in that Instagram put up. “It was to query what we’re and whether or not it issues.”
It is likely to be a cliché, however what actually issues is the music. Even when IIcons just isn’t their greatest, it’s nonetheless way more fascinating than most of what will get performed on the massive phases Two Shell occupy nowadays. Hopefully the duo can relaxation up, discover some new inspiration, and take off their disguises. Or simply get some newer, crazier ones. They might open a restaurant, begin a faux nation-state, make dance music for pets. They might additionally simply be Jack and Patrick (or “Pete”), pumping out insidiously hooky dance tracks with out hiding behind something in any respect, studying from their errors and having enjoyable making new ones.
