Torturetwinn Will Ruin You and You Will Thank Them For It

Kelsey Karter and the Heroines / Torturetwinn The Middle East Upstairs | Cambridge, Mass. | June 16

Photography by K.M. North

Let me tell you something about the first time you hear a band that ruins you a little bit. Not in a bad way. In the way where you're sitting there, 10 seconds into a song on some random playlist, and your whole body goes "oh no, not again" because you know what's coming. You know you're about to fall down a hole. That's what Andrew Devin did to me.

Andrew Devin is Torturetwinn. Post-punk out of Virginia. One guy with a band name that sounds like a dare and songs that make good on it. I found him the way you find anything worth finding, accidentally, on a playlist, sandwiched between other people's music, and he hit me like a slap I didn't see coming. I went to the artist page. I went to YouTube. I subscribed. And then I spent the better part of a year watching Andrew Devin do exactly what a real musician does: work. Studio videos. Covers with genuine taste behind them. No performance of being an artist, just the actual thing, a guy laying down bass tracks at midnight because the song demanded it, talking to a camera about what Torturetwinn means to him with the kind of honesty that you almost feel embarrassed watching, like you caught something private. That's the part people forget about. The music has to be good, and brother, it is. From the "Blood Love" EP through "Feeler," their full-length that dropped in March, these songs have grit and swagger and that specific post-punk electricity that makes you feel like something matters. But the reason you stick around is because you believe the person making it. You believe Andrew Devin. That's rarer than a great riff. Hot off the new single "Apologies," Torturetwinn came to Cambridge to open for Kelsey Karter and the Heroines at the Upstairs at The Middle East, and they played like they had something to prove to every person in that room. They played like the set was 30 seconds from being cut short and they were going to fit everything they had into whatever time was left. Post-punk is supposed to have that urgency and half the bands playing it now forgot the memo. Torturetwinn did not forget. They burned through the set, old stuff, new stuff, all of it locked in tight, and by the end the crowd was already warmed past room temperature. Then Kelsey Karter and the Heroines walked out and absolutely leveled the place.

Photography by K.M. North

I'd heard the stories. You always hear the stories. The live shows, the raucous crowds, people losing their minds in the best possible way. Hearing it and standing in it are two different things entirely, and standing in a packed room watching people sing every word back with that kind of desperate, loving ferocity is not something you walk out of unchanged. I don't care what anyone says about rock being dead. Rock isn't dead. It showed up on a Tuesday night in Cambridge and it sounded incredible. "Don't be gone, don't be gone for long." That's Torturetwinn, from "Red Lights," and they mean it as a love song. But walking out into the night after a show like this, I mean it as a prayer. Come back. We need this more than you know.