Two Shell

You should, by now, both know and not know who Two Shell are. The pair have studiously cultivated their allure while actively concealing their identities, at once anonymous and ubiquitous. Call them Schrödinger’s DJs. They send stand-ins to play shows, distribute press shots that depict a rotating cast of strangers (though always in pairs), and have trotted out patently deepfaked collabs with Frank Ocean and Taylor Swift. The few interviews they’ve done have either “self-destructed” or played like an extended bit, leaving readers more confused than when they arrived. Dedicated fans follow trails of digital breadcrumbs and track their output in Google Docs. The closest thing to a Two Shell album so far is a USB stick encased in a “boring rock” sold via Bandcamp, the price of which fluctuated on demand. The contents varied for each person who bought one, too.

They’ve been toeing this cheeky line in earnest since 2022, after pivoting from a markedly more straightforward debut for Livity Sound in 2019. Many of the same ingredients have remained—crisp drums, thrummed bass, precise sound design, and a heavy debt to jungle, techno, and UKG—but now come with a hi-def glow, with the helium squeals and saccharine swirls of hyperpop pushed to the fore. Depending on your sympathies, the Two Shell project is either a smart sendup of the music industry, a pioneering example of fanbase development for the decentralized digital age, or annoying and self-congratulatory. Perhaps all of the above. Pitting hijinks against high art, it’s all very KLF, and a little bit post-truth.

At the same time, business records name the duo as Jack Benson and Patrick Lewis, who scene sleuths have identified as the pair behind Jynx and Player 2—two fun, if unremarkable, house- and garage-indebted projects from the 2010s. In one archived interview from 2017, as Jynx, they cite as their influences “lots of stuff Rinse [FM] have pushed over the years. And loads of what Gilles Peterson has always played,” as well as Basement Jaxx, Gorillaz, and Sugababes—all of which seems incredibly prescient, given that the duo would go on to create fictitious characters for themselves and put out several bootlegs of the Sugababes’ “Round Round.” But as with seemingly anything Two Shell do, merely knowing these facts isn’t necessarily illuminating. So committing to something as traditional as a 14-track debut album for an established record label presents a choice for the duo: either, as the opening refrain suggests, to “come to terms with the truth of it, come to terms with the real,” or to keep spraying the façade with bolder, brighter, more mischievous japes and distractions.

The great effort here is obfuscation, from the penchant for blown-out pads and kicks to the pixel-spatter album art. (Even the text of the album’s slim press release arrives glitched out in Zalgo.) When they go for it, the results can be astoundingly original. Against back-combed synths, the villainous AI system from Portal sings a lullaby on “inside,” and asks, uncaring, “What is real?” Just as soon as a musical touchpoint takes shape—and there is a smorgasbord on offer—it will be flipped and ripped to bits. The Trinibad keys opening “gimmi it” abruptly give way to a scramble of snapped drums and vocal chops. Amid the adrenaline gush, a calm, detached voice can be heard, waking from an acid dream: “This is really nice.” “dreamcast” nods further in the direction of the unreal, in both its title and the fizzy synths and nondescript woodblock clomps that conjure video-game loading screens—those waiting rooms for the extended universes that game developers promise. (An old Pinterest account for the pair collects images from Tekken, Tomb Raider, and Ghost in the Shell as inspiration; the Two Shell logo itself isn’t a long way from the Sony Computer Entertainment emblem of the ’90s and ’00s.)

The jokes don’t always land. “be somebody” seemingly riffs on a Kings of Leon power ballad, but it’s not clear to what end. Closing opus “Mirror” sounds like Burial six Red Bulls deep, flicking through Instagram Reels—and not necessarily in a good way. But in the album’s standout, “[rock✧solid],” Two Shell have produced a rarefied piece of unhinged dancefloor gold. It’s so good precisely because—with its jumbled vocals and physical rhythms—it’s not trying to be too clever. It is primal in its hedonism.

The highfalutin take on all this is that it is postmodernism writ large: no single identity, no objective perspective; all time, and art within it, is for the taking. Several different advance versions of this album were sent to Pitchfork editors, with varying tracklists and trollish versions of multiple songs. When a new video for lead single “Everybody Worldwide” dropped on the same day as the album was released, it was longer and stranger (and more sugary) than either the initial single version or the track available on the album itself. There’s every chance that, by the time this review is published, the whole record will have been altered entirely. Or simply disappeared.

It’s Time for Electronic Music to Turn Its Dreams Into Reality

It’s easy to overthink a fun creative endeavor. Two Shell may well have been conceived as a treatise on computers, creativity, and the AI-shaped future we seem to be hurtling toward. Above all, though, what comes through is something simpler. In fact, the duo may already have given it away amid all the trickery. Back in 2022, when they gave that since-deleted interview with The Face magazine, Pat and Jack said that they “want to make new ways for people to feel excited about the things they like.” Sometimes that means making a weird website, or a hat with a light on it. And sometimes it's just a case of lining up the drums and bassline in such a way that the dancefloor can forget about going to work on Monday.