Ten years have passed since Homeworlding, and Fraternal Twin are back with a record that carries those ten years all over it. Halo Fell Forever brings together songs written as far back as 2015 alongside much more recent ones, but it never feels stitched together from different eras. If anything, it sounds like Tom Christie needed that distance to finally hear what those songs had been trying to tell him.
Anxiety, depression, relationships that reshape you, friendships you have to leave behind, the same thoughts going round and round until they start to wear grooves into your head: all of it runs through the record. Christie keeps coming back to the feeling of being trapped, whether that means a room, a relationship, or a version of himself that no longer fits. On “Solitude” he fights his own shadows; on “Medicine” he tries to reconnect with the person he remembers being; and on “Lucidity” things get even more uncomfortable, as he loses trust in his own judgement until he starts seeing everything through someone else’s eyes.
But Halo Fell Forever isn’t a record about giving up. Its sharpest idea sits in the title track. That fallen halo is innocence, sure, but it is also the pressure to become whatever other people want you to be. Christie repeats “it’s not evil / it’s tarnished gold” like he is trying to hammer a difficult truth into his own head: you can fuck up, waste time, make the wrong call and still not be a bad person.
Musically, the record sits in a heavy, spacious strain of slowcore, with echoes of Codeine and Bedhead and the bruised intimacy of The Microphones or Elliott Smith. The guitars are never just scenery, though. They knot around each other, swell, fray at the edges and eventually break into noise, often taking over when Christie has run out of words. The end of “Metamorphosis” even keeps parts of the original demo because the band could never quite recreate that same rush in the studio. Sometimes the rough take knows better.
And that feels like the whole point of Halo Fell Forever. It doesn’t try to fix the past or polish it into a neat little lesson. It keeps the cracks. Ten years later, Fraternal Twin aren’t back to make up for lost time. They’ve made a record out of it.
Listen to Halo Fell Forever here
Tour Dates
10 September Tubby’s (Kingston, NY) w/ Kissing Well, Nora Knight
11 September Union Pool (Brooklyn, NY) w/ People I Love, Coolant
12 September Abyssinia (Philadelphia, PA) w/ TBA
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