FOR EVERYONE CURRENTLY LOSING THEIR SHIT: PRESS PLAY.

FEELER hits us right in our goth and punk sensibilities and makes us want to grab the Aqua Net, pull on the fishnets, and head to the goth bar. By Elena Stevens

Images courtesy of TORTURETWINN

Turn the lights down. Invite five people you actually like. Push the furniture against the wall and put FEELER on loud enough that the neighbors know something is happening.

That’s probably the proper way to listen to TORTURETWINN.

We first wandered into their orbit back in June. At the time, I wrote that TORTURETWINN would ruin you and you’d thank them for it. I stand by that. But FEELER made me realize there was another side to this thing I hadn’t quite accounted for.

You can dance to the damage.

FEELER came out in March, which means, yes, we’re late. Fine. Some records arrive on Friday with a small army demanding your immediate attention, only to disappear when the next Friday rolls around. Others hang around long enough for you to find them on your own.

This is one of those records.

Eleven songs in, FEELER doesn’t feel particularly interested in behaving itself. New wave, post-punk, alternative rock, synths, guitars, desire, obsession, heartbreak. It’s all knocking around in there together, and somehow the thing never collapses under the weight of it.

More importantly, it has songs. Actual songs.

“Heater” has swagger. “Keep You” pushes harder. “Midnight Craving,” featuring ViRG, takes longing and obsession and makes both sound like perfectly reasonable excuses to stay out too late. There are hooks all over this record, the kind that show up in your head hours later without asking permission.

For a record occupied by people who seem to be having a spectacularly bad time emotionally, FEELER is also a hell of a lot of fun. That contradiction is where TORTURETWINN gets interesting.

The record spends plenty of time tangled up in desire, dependency, heartbreak, memory, and all the stupid things human beings do when we want somebody too much. But it never sinks into the couch and asks you to stare at the ceiling with it.

It gets up.

That might be why FEELER works so well as a full record. I didn’t want to start pulling songs out and feeding them to a playlist. One track kept dragging me into the next until I stopped thinking about tracks altogether.

Start at the beginning and leave the damn thing alone.

We’ve gotten very good at consuming music in pieces. Find the single. Save it. Shuffle it between 400 other songs. Move on.

FEELER deserves better than that.

And then, nine tracks in, there’s “Stay Hurt.”

This is the one that got me.

Maybe it’s the kid who grew up in the ’80s talking, but my brain went straight to The Lost Boys. Not because “Stay Hurt” sounds like 1987. It doesn’t. It’s something harder to pin down than that.

It’s the feeling.

There was a particular kind of darkness that ran through the music and movies of that era where danger, desire, heartbreak, sex, and ridiculous romantic drama were all allowed to exist in the same place without anybody winking at the camera.

“Stay Hurt” taps that nerve.

Put it against neon, motorcycles, bad decisions, and vampires and tell me it doesn’t belong there.

I’ll wait.

That doesn’t make TORTURETWINN a nostalgia act. Quite the opposite. The references may feel familiar if you grew up around goth, punk, new wave, and everything lurking between them, but FEELER never sounds like somebody rummaging through another generation’s closet looking for something cool to wear.

It takes that emotional excess and does something with it now.

And maybe that’s the punk sensibility I keep hearing in this record. Not necessarily in how it sounds, but in the instinct behind it.

Commit to the thing.

If you’re going to want somebody, want them too much. If your heart is going to break, let the fucker break. If you’re going to make a dark record, don’t forget that somebody still has to move when you play it.

By the time “Remember Me” and “Butterflies” carry FEELER through its final stretch, the record has done something I wish more albums would do.

It made me want to hear it again.

Not analyze it again. Not find the single. Not decide which three songs belong on some playlist I’ll forget exists next month.

Play it again.

So call five friends. Turn the lights down. Push the furniture out of the way. Build a shitty little goth dive bar in your living room for the night.

TORTURETWINN brought the heartbreak.

You bring the Aqua Net.