In their sixth LP, Twin Shadow gets mired in the heartbreak doldrums for a pretty but fatigued record devoid of the warmth and play that elevated earlier works.
Twin Shadow, songwriter-producer George William Lewis Jr.’s solo project hit early critical acclaim with their debut LP Forget (2010) and follow-up Confess (2012), whose rubbery rhythms garnered critical praise. However, they failed to catapult him into the synthdie-rock stratosphere artists like The Weeknd then occupied.
In the decade since, the Dominican-born Floridian artist survived two work-informing motor accidents, signed with and left Warner Music, founded his own Cheree Cheree label, toured with Death Cab for Cutie, collaborated with HAIM, released three more albums, and made his presence known at New York Fashion Week as one of the “music world’s leading fashion dilettantes.”
By his most recent record, 2021’s self-titled Twin Shadow seemed to be losing steam. Critics praised the sunny ease of that record inspired by Lewis’ Dominican heritage but identified a particular blur rendering each track indistinguishable from the others. It was summer hang background music.
Out of steam, Twin Shadow sputters to a stop on Georgie, out now via Cheree Cheree. The blah of the previous record pervades this one, lending atmosphere to a myopic, heartbroken night of rumination and numbing out.
The record evokes a moody men’s cologne commercial or Mark Scout’s depressed widower apartment in Severance. It’s cold, resigned, and stagnant; Lewis seems weary. Rather than a venue for catharsis, the music seems like something he trudges through.
Lyrics are literal, plain, and not in a “simple wisdom” way. On track 2, “Good Times,” Lewis musters the energy to sing, “All you ever do is bring me down,” and “So there’s this dream I sometimes have where you’re a ghost, and I’m alive.”
Nearly every song follows the same sonic arc. A syrup-thick beat begins — pleasantly enveloping at first, but tiresome after underpinning almost a dozen tracks — followed by Lewis’ droopy vocals, until an unearned build to a synched-over final chorus and/or a fun instrumental break. These experimental interludes are the only place in the record where Lewis takes swings, plays, and experiments as he did on his lively early records, yet he tightly contains them, abandoning them wholesale by the next verse. Any sudden move towards variety on the record feels like Lucy and the football: a track will build, then flatline, experiment, then drop back into anhedonia, or even make it to an interesting place — and then end. Next song, rinse, repeat.
Devastated music need not be so drab. But Georgie seems stuck both spiritually and sonically in the phase of a breakup that zaps the heartbroken of all their energy and convinces them that their depression is real; there is no brighter world, no remaining meaning, outside their bedroom door: all there is left is to lie prone and lament. This languishing packs a punch on dreamy interlude-esque “Geor(g.i.e.)” but grows old stretched over 35 minutes. A la the meeting that could have been an email; perhaps this album fully realizes itself in an interlude.
Vocal layering on closer “Hide It in Attraction” resembles other voices joining Lewis’, spurring the realization that until this point, the record never seemed to remember the notion of people, friends, or a world outside the central lost romance. In this way, Georgie evokes falling asleep on an airplane: all blue-tinged dark, stale AC blowing, liminal stuckness, and detachment from the place, people, and the pockets of exploration that come from realizing the suffocating stillness of this lonely room is not all there is.
