The intervening years have seen the duo release a variety of singles along with 2015’s full album, White Noise, which saw the Twin Oaks sound grow into grander, more epic soundscapes full of ethereal guitars and pounding drums. Now the band are preparing a brand new EP, Collapse, to be put out sometime this summer. After the unveiling of lead single ‘Eighteen Minutes‘ late last year, we’re delighted to present second single ‘Nothing’ to further increase the anticipation of the EP.

Mixed and mastered by Grammy Award-winning engineer Cassidy Turbin, the track perfects Twin Oaks’ odd ability to sound at once stark and lush, Brown’s contained, ominous vocals cycling with unnerving rhythm, each repetition triggering an escalation in the instrumentation. So while the first verse plays to dark dream folk along the lines of Daughter, the second is accompanied by a near post-rock drum thump, the intensity surging by the closing minutes with a wall of electric guitar and feedback drone.

“Please forgive me, for I have sinned
I’m not my own friend
Feel the weight of the world sink in
I’m drowning in this

Pulling back my skin
Digging deep with it
I’m finding nothing
I’m finding nothing”

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Miss last month’s edition? Listen to our January round-up.

February Mix from Wake The Deaf on 8tracks Radio.

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Opener ‘Liars & Thieves’, is pretty much a folk song, with an acoustic strum rotating beneath Lauren Brown’s sultry vocals. ‘Constellation Lines’ has a slightly more electronic flavour, with a persistent drum beat and slightly ominous sounding synths.

Brown’s vocals are great throughout and add a real intimacy and dreamlike quality to the album. There is also a sliver of melancholy which permeates through the album, providing that strange tinge of sadness that all the best dreams leave behind.

The band list Cat Power, Mazzy Star, Sharon Van Etten and The xx as influences, and (perhaps with the addition of Beach House) that sounds pretty accurate to me. If you like any of those artists then you should definitely give The Lion’s Den a try.

Get the album via the Twin Oaks Bandcamp page for the ludicrously low price of just $5 (just over three quid for us in the UK).

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Not An Exit is dreamy in more ways than one. The overall sound could be pegged at ‘Dream Pop’ and filed next to Lemolo or Fiona Apple, although the slighly fuzzy and minimal instrumentation conveys a slow serene imagining rather than some vividly ethereal fantasy. The result is a collection of songs that sound confidently crafted and fully controlled, holding the hand of the listener through beautiful oneiric landscape they have created. The EP bubbles away until (my personal favourite) ‘Shipwreck’ dares to break through a little more with it’s desperate refrain. It drags the listener back from the comfortable meander they had enjoying presents the always-just-masked emotion for all to see. It’s a cleverly put together piece that deserves to be played in order.

The other aspect of dreaminess on Not An Exit runs through the lyrics. On ‘Not An Exit’ Brown sings ’Wake up darlin’, wake up to a lucid dream’ and the line heralds the themes across the album. On each song there are references to dreams; Maybe not bona fide nighttime-in-bed dreams, but psychological constructs that we all experience. Imaginings and fantasies, fears and worries, they are all running through these songs to produce something that is paradoxically very real (as in recognisable) while also being fictitious (in that we have no way of directly observing or measuring them).

The fact that I’ve looked so deeply (too deeply?) into these songs is a testament to this duo. They create music that demands repeated listens and makes you think a little more than maybe you would normally, which for a Dream Pop band (a genre which is often focussed solely on nice sounds as a form of escapism) is no mean feat. Buy the EP on Bandcamp where you can also download the title track free of charge.

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