Ambiguity is Two Shell’s secret weapon, because it makes you go back, over and over, to figure out what the hell they’re actually doing. The rush of “Doom Culture” is brain-scrambling. Shrill synths and curdled basslines hint at aggression, but the rigid kick and strangled vocal sound more like a deeply abstracted ballroom bitch track. “⋆₊˚vision✧‧⁺˖⋆.” is slip-n-slide garage, threatening to careen out of control as every sound is beveled and polished to a skeuomorphic sheen. The staggering “Dark Shadow” sounds both brooding and cartoonish, invoking dubstep’s dentist-drill basslines with equal parts menace and humor, while the vocal captures the icky sensation of accidentally chewing foil. These tracks are uncomfortable and uncanny—never just one thing at any given time—and you can hear in them the excitement that the duo seemed to radiate in every direction when it hit its stride around 2022.
The rest of IIcons is more predictable. The potential hit, “finding my spirit,” tackles a house track head on where Two Shell would usually zig-zag, with a vocal that feels strangely serious. It sounds so much like a Four Tet song that it’s already associated with Four Tet, and it lacks the alien contours we look for in a Two Shell tune. Other tracks, like “eXist” and “Moving Shadow,” are perfectly fine, though they also sound like fairly standard riffs on UK dance music, without the weirdness or ugliness that makes the duo’s best music stick jaggedly in your brain.
Lucky for us, Two Shell remain absolutely sick producers. It often feels like they dreamed up new rare-earth elements and tried to map them in sound—soft, hard, metallic, plasticine, jiggy, all at once—and they’re still pushing the needle leftward. They make underground dance music more pop-friendly, and the pop-friendly side of things more confrontational and silly. But IIcons also shows us that for all their… iconoclasm… Two Shell are heading down a well-trodden path. Their original tactic of taking the piss out of DJ culture doesn’t make as much sense now that they’re as popular and revered as the big-time selectors they once poked fun at. “The intention was never to troll,” they say in that Instagram post. “It was to question what we are and whether it matters.”
It might be a cliché, but what really matters is the music. Even if IIcons is not their best, it’s still far more interesting than most of what gets played on the big stages Two Shell occupy these days. Hopefully the duo can rest up, find some new inspiration, and take off their disguises. Or just get some newer, crazier ones. They could open a restaurant, start a fake nation-state, make dance music for pets. They could also just be Jack and Patrick (or “Pete”), pumping out insidiously hooky dance tracks without hiding behind anything at all, learning from their mistakes and having fun making new ones.
