Vanishing Twin

For a dozen years, the international trio Vanishing Twin has been a supreme psychedelic synthesist, plundering the world of outbound sounds—German kosmische, Brazilian tropicalia, French yé-yé, English electronics—to build uncanny songs that feel both here and there. This porous boundary between lived experience and an alternate reality has been a central part of singer Cathy Lucas’s life since before it began. When her mother was pregnant, her twin sister was absorbed by her own embryo, a shadow self that has always been with her. Vanishing Twin, then, tunnels through the surreal with rhythms and textures that feel strange and new but anchors them to hooks that pull the listener back to the surface, back to reality. Their first three albums, starting with 2016’s aptly titled Choose Your Own Adventure, followed in the wonderfully plundering path of Stereolab and Broadcast, where sound and song were equal stars.

On 2023’s Afternoon X, the trio of Lucas, Valentina Magaletti, and Susumu Mukai dove deeper into abstraction. “Lazy Garden” sounds the way heat radiating from the ground feels on a blazing day, while “Brain Weather” is a fugue state, its hums and clicks and wordless incantations moving in slow circles. They bring those experiments to bear on Archives, Vanishing Twin’s forthcoming Fire Records opus that embeds some of their sharpest hooks ever in some of their most glorious sonic experiments. Somehow bridging murder ballads with boom-bap drums and sophisticated harmonies, “Bring Me the Axe” feels like a fight song for rebellion. A story of temptation and nonconformity, “Familiar Fruit” underpins an arcing melody with complicated rhythmic games. It is Vanishing Twin’s best album yet, a fusion of familiar exotica that, taken together, lands as a revelation.