REVIEW: Two Shell - IIcons

2shell 2 techtasy: extra more club anything-ing, hypættacc, bring own caffeine

38:32 // July 14th, 2025 // Young

Two Shell face the unenviable challenge of restoring an enigmatic presence to dance music's familiar cheap thrills. For years before they turned to conventional album releases, their scope lay (and continues to lie) in a shadowy web of material hidden behind password screens and interactive games or staged in live sets where the duo were rumoured to be replaced by body doubles or else entirely absent. They are also anonymous, which to my eyes and ears is a cogent thing regardless of their marketing: where certain artists use anonymity as a smoke and mirrors play to stage an intriguing creative presence over otherwise drab material, Two Shell's music works so well devoid of any context at all that the ins and outs of its authorship are circumstantial faff.

Translation: these two goons make wired post-PC Music earworms that cater equal parts to dancefloor punters and to overstimulated net rats. If their conceit of artificial scarcity is largely for the benefit of an in-the-know Discord crowd, then that's neither here nor there — their bangers bang, their bass squelches, their kicks pound, their vocals trip catchy altitudes of helium, and their deconstructive touches are so gettable that they land as readymade in-jokes without a sniff of consumer alienation. Need there be any more to it? No need for a friendly face when your cocktail of hooky earworms and disconcertingly inclusive referential humour is already sticking the landing.

For the level of self-evident we're talking here, IIcons' opener "Can You Hear Me?" kicks off midway through the tailend of a synth chord: the album begins, and, one entire second in, a sound triggered before it started has died. Starts and endings all mixed up, subversion, hurr. Laugh along or shrug it off, but you'd have to be chopping up pills in the room next door to miss the gag. The song goes on to take a garbled vocal line and run it through every set of tremolo settings and hooky melody the duo can think of until it becomes intelligible enough to reveal itself as the titular lyric. Can You Hear Me? Yes. Yes, we have. Well done. Hurr. We soak up a hit of schoolkid gratification from finding the correct answer to a straightforward question; we take a heady sniff of irony over an act so wrapped up in intrigue mystique launching into their ultrashiny surprise-released new album with something so banal; ultimately, we content ourselves with the track's slick production and plentiful hooks, and feel that we are in safe hands. Since "Can You Hear Me?" is a cheap trick that frankly anyone could have pulled, seen off with extra dopamine, we do not care whose hands these are.

Wise enough not to overdo it, Two Shell step briskly onwards from this brand of idiotic smartarsery and spend most of the remaining tracklist laying down banger after compact banger. There's a few idiosyncratic touches—the strangled inhalations on "Doom Culture"! The vibrancy with which "Clutch" magicks that surliest of club genres, UK bass, into an affable endorphin rush—and a few inevitable meme captions (It's Two Shell… two! Two Shell!), but by and large we are here to dance, and dance we do! In a seamless interchange of styles, Two Shell erase the difference between bedroom space and irl clubspace, laying down a spread of tunes for all denominations of ravers and nerds over a steady current of energy (excepting a sticky patch of connective tissue in the album's middle run).

The duo do great work flexing their versatility: much of the album's charm is to be found in the deftness with which they transition from " ⋆₊˚vision✧‧⁺˖⋆." [sic]'s 2-step bustle to "Doom Culture"'s Dorian Electra-assisted pizzazz-a-zazz, or from the peaks of "Dark Shadow"'s dubstep meltdown to "as the world bleeds"' cruising breakbeat. These song-sized ideas work best in the context of one another's momentum, but they also hold up as standalone attractions. Two Shell save the best for (almost) last in this regard, landing a climax for the whole tracklist with "finding my spirit"'s rapturous house. This track's leaden refrain asks hey you, can I get my spirit back?, and as its uplifting chords and toe-tapping rhythm answer that yes, yes you absolutely can, suddenly that selfsame spirit is right there, its energy conveniently interchangeable with practically anyone else's, and a listener becomes one happy pixel of a wider audience. Everything is in harmony and nothing at all can go wrong — and if Two Shell title the following, final track "w a k e u p" and build it out of the universe's most irritating alarm-adjacent synth tone? At this point, uh, fucking fine.

All of which amounts to a competent run of thrills, spills and assorted dance things. IIcons doesn't flow together with the feverish DJ mix approximation of last year's Two Shell and neither does it tap into quite the same eccentric spirit when it comes to off-kilter hooks or epileptic freakouts. What we're treated to this time is safer, steadier, perhaps more intuitive to move your body to, but ultimately less singular outside of its self-referential messaging and occasional deadpan ecstasy. Two Shell have done more than most when it comes to both embracing and disguising the Dopamine Rush in all its hollowness, but IIcons sticks closely enough to a more conventional playbook that said hollowness begins to feel equal parts feature and bug across repeated listens. Does that leave room for healthy club fodder or as good an excuse as any to fake-high in front of your laptop screen? It's certainly nothing less.

7/10

Further listening:

Two Shell - Two Shell
Zorza - Hyperdream
Shygirl - Club Shy
PinkPantheress - Fancy That
HAAi - Baby, We're Ascending