Twin Temple have always understood that the most effective way to make darkness seductive is to wrap it in something beautiful. On “Doomed Lovers,” the title track from their forthcoming third album, Alexandra and Zachary James take their signature Satanic doo-wop and expand it into something considerably more cinematic. Produced by Grammy-winning producer Shooter Jennings at Hollywood’s legendary Sunset Sound Studio 3, the song surrounds Alexandra’s smoky, vintage-styled vocal with twanging guitar, chiming percussion and lush orchestration from a 37-piece orchestra. The result is an extravagant romantic ballad that sounds like it could have drifted out of another era, albeit one where eternal devotion, death and damnation are hopelessly intertwined.
The title track is only one part of a record that appears to push Twin Temple’s sound in several directions. “Haunt Me,” which the duo performed on The Daily Show, is more overtly rooted in their vintage-pop aesthetic, while the recently released “Love You To Death” takes the traditional American murder-ballad form and filters it through Twin Temple’s obsession with doomed romance. Rather than focusing on murder itself, the song explores jealousy, betrayal and desire taken to a dangerous extreme. Together, the three released songs suggest an album fascinated by the darker consequences of love while continually contrasting those subjects with polished, almost impossibly pretty arrangements.
That contrast becomes especially intriguing when considering the rest of the album’s tracklist. “Possessed,” “I Want Blood,” “Someone In The Walls,” “Monster” and “Nothing Matters” surround the three released songs with titles that promise considerably more menace, while the sequencing places “Love You To Death” immediately after “I Want Blood” and “Haunt Me” directly before “Someone In The Walls.” The album is only 25 minutes long, so Twin Temple appear to be favoring concise, sharply drawn songs rather than an expansive rock-opera approach. We haven’t heard those five unreleased tracks yet, but their placement alongside the released material points toward a record that intends to make its macabre themes part of the songwriting itself rather than merely its visual presentation.
The visual world surrounding “Doomed Lovers” reinforces that ambition. Shot entirely on 16mm by Dante Capone and Fred Joseph, the video imagines Alexandra and Zachary as lovers facing the end of the world together. Grain, optical effects and double exposures give it the appearance of a half-remembered film rather than a contemporary music video, while the ocean becomes a metaphor for something beautiful, immense and impossible to control. It is an unusually good match for the song because Twin Temple’s retro aesthetic has always depended on the collision between the familiar and the unsettling; here, they turn that collision into a full cinematic language.
Doomed Lovers is therefore shaping up to be more than another exercise in Twin Temple’s Satanic doo-wop formula. The released songs show Alexandra and Zachary James leaning harder into classic pop, countrypolitan and murder-ballad traditions while expanding their arrangements with a 37-piece orchestra and analog production. More importantly, the material comes from a period the duo has described as one of the darkest of their lives, involving grief, health struggles, addiction and depression. That context gives the album’s fixation on obsessive love and mortality a weight that goes beyond the band’s theatrical imagery. Doomed Lovers arrives October 9, and based on what Twin Temple have released so far, the most interesting development isn’t that they’ve made their sound darker—it’s that they’ve made it considerably more beautiful. – Jason Felton