Given their playful public picture, it would look like Two Shell crashed into the murky world of UK bass like a glitter bomb in a cement manufacturing unit. However in actuality, the mysterious London duo got here in a Computer virus manufactured from unassuming stuff: brittle textures, stark tone colours, sternly syncopated beats. Their 2019 debut EP for Livity Sound match neatly with the lean, percussive fashion of leftfield UK membership music. Their anthemic tendencies earned comparisons to Overmono and Bicep, UK duos recognized for supersizing underground tropes for big-room crowds. And Two Shell’s edits—like “Marriage ceremony Follow,” which makes zero try to disguise a sizeable chunk lifted from Alicia Keys’ “If I Ain’t Obtained You”—put them in a category alongside artists like 4 Tet and Jamie xx, who wield canny bootlegs as floor-filling pageant wildcards.
However not lengthy after they’d established themselves as promising new skills working inside a well-defined lane, a change was flipped, and the nameless duo turned out to have far more mischievous inclinations. On Two Shell’s 2020 combine CD, ɪᴍᴘᴀᴄᴛ21, songs by canonical acts like Skee Masks and the Prodigy bumped up towards shards of digital-native kinds like nightcore and hyperpop. They’ve not too long ago dusted their music with helium-huffing vocals paying homage to SOPHIE and peppered their units with cheeky flips of Sugababes and the Corrs. Digging is a part of any DJ’s job, however listening to Two Shell drop chirpy remixes of unknown emo randos suggests an affinity with Gen Z’s digital avant-garde that you just received’t discover amongst most of their post-dubstep friends.
The audaciousness of Two Shell’s productions is matched by the slipperiness of the duo’s presentation. Of their Boiler Room look at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound final month, they carried out sporting absurd disguises—chain mail and fabric goat horns on one, clown wig and nylon-stocking face masks on the opposite—and had been nearly definitely pantomiming to a pre-recorded combine. There are even rumors that the 2 folks behind the decks weren’t Two Shell in any respect. The deeper you descend via the Two Shell trying glass, the extra the entire enterprise begins to tackle the air of a grade-A piss take, a no-fucks-given sendup of latest DJ tradition. But on Icons, their most substantial launch so far, the music, at the least, is not any joke.
In comparison with the breakneck tempo and cotton-candy textures of their current jungle edit “Residence,” Icons’ 5 tracks at first sound nearly staid. There are many sped-up vocals and zippy synths, however the tempos are extra measured, the constructions extra streamlined, the beats extra consistent with the previous decade of bass-heavy UK techno. Pleasure Orbison’s game-changing 2009 single “Hyph Mngo” is their apparent lodestar; you possibly can hear it nearly verbatim within the hiccupping vocal loop of the opening “Ghosts” and the fluttering synths of “Pods,” which follows. Whereas it’s hardly an obscure decide—no music did extra to mark the tip of the dubstep period and the start of the amorphous stylistic free-for-all that adopted—it’s been some time since anybody zeroed in so doggedly on the music’s ecstatic qualities. Nearly each factor of Icons feels engineered to copy the dizzy rush of nightclubbing at its most exhilarating, when a brand new sound will get its claws into you for the primary time.
