In a dance-music scene deep in the throes of Y2K nostalgia, Two Shell have managed to ride the zeitgeist without being too obvious about it. Sure, the styles that the mysteriously masked UK duo pluck from are all very much in fashion: the racing drums of jungle, the synthetic rush of hyperpop, the cybernetic throb of techno. But for all of their trollish online lore-building, the music itself has never felt gimmicky. Last year’s Icons EP was a glitched-out slab of slippery grooves and headphone-candy sound design that required zero knowledge of their cryptic personae to appreciate. Two Shell have occasionally earned comparisons to the conceptual genre exercises of PC Music, but they’re as functional a dancefloor companion as any of the festival-crowd-filling UK club acts to which they’re often likened.
On lil spirits, Two Shell lean further into the internet-brained aesthetic they’ve developed through their various extra-musical stunts, dialing up the helium-ballooned vocals, bubblegum basslines, and digital intimacy in their lyrics. As on last year’s heavenly single “home,” lil spirits’ notification pings and chatroom-crush admissions mimic the dopamine hit of opening your phone to a flirty smiley face. It’s an all-around cuter affair than Icons, more explicitly streamlined in its hyperpop aesthetics, but a little less exciting in turn.
Like Icons, lil spirits feels caught in an endless shapeshift; tracks mutate from one gelatinous bassline to the next, governed by an inscrutable logic. The opening “i m e s s a g e” is the most straightforward workout of the bunch, bouncing on a squishy, dribbling groove as text-to-speech vocals swirl, singing of communication breakdown. “I don’t really know how to talk about it,” the TTS awkwardly enunciates, its cybernetic vocals shifting and riding along like an artificial MC vamping over the beat. On the slower “mind_dᴉlɟ,” the ping-ponging rhythm drops out halfway through to reveal a digital narrator calling itself the Mind Flipper, who guides the song through a bitcrushed tunnel of sounds before a clipping microhouse outro. Just when the song regains momentum, everything cuts to black—“Disk full,” says a robotic voice, and it’s as funny as it is frustrating.
The sparkly “love him” is one of the most directly SOPHIE-indebted productions the duo has crafted yet, topping its hyperactive, sped-up synths with cellular beeps and chopped-up vocals recalling Eiffel 65. A buzz-sawing tone clinches the absurdity, ushering the song toward its conclusion with a ridiculously plonked-out melody; it’s as if an elementary schooler started hammering away on their dad’s collection of expensive analog synths. “bluefairy” splinters into even more directions, its moody, aquatic front end giving way to a manic sequence of cheerleading vocals. “Entering hyperspeed,” announces a gentlemanly British voice, before deciding it’s time to go to the supermarket. The effect isn’t far off from watching a corecore video compilation: The song’s introspective aura is slowly swallowed whole by a constant slideshow of cascading thoughts.
