Q&A: With a Dreamy and Heavy New Record, Fraternal Twin is Back and Ready to Stay
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY CAROLINA SIMIONATO ☆
Photo by Yamile Abuid
TEN YEARS AFTER THEIR LAST RECORD, FRATERNAL TWIN IS BACK—.Gifts abound: an extended version of Skin Gets Hot, originally released in 2015, was repressed by Jersey label Bored Science, and new singles and music videos pave the way for Halo Fell Forever, the new record coming out September 4.
The past ten years in founder, guitarist and vocalist Tom Christie’s life haven't exactly been quiet. Moves, mental health struggles and the pandemic have meant a decade of pains and growth, some of which can be heard in dreamy and heavy Halo Fell Forever. Still, one need look no further than “Medicine,” the band’s latest single, to sense the promising path Fraternal Twin and Christie are on, and that he just might have found the “spirit guide from the photographs” mentioned in the song.
With a tour and record release coming up, fans will be happy to hear that this could be the start of Fraternal Twin’s best phase yet, as the band’s plans don’t stop there. Now with a stable lineup that includes Marco Spodek (drums), Mariah Houston (guitar) and Forrest Philpot (bass), in addition to Christie, more music, live shows and a possible new record are on the band’s horizon.
Read below to find out what has been going on with Fraternal Twin and Christie, and what is coming next.
Photo by Yamile Abuid
LUNA: It's been 10 years since Homeworlding. What have you been up to?
CHRISTIE: I can't really believe that it's been that long. Life just got in the way for a long time. I had some mental health issues and depression, and then, you know, COVID just interfered with everything. It was a pretty heavy several years. But I feel better than ever, excited about the future of this band. Maybe half of this new record are songs that I wrote in 2015, 2016, 2017, that I was never able to release until now, and I'm really excited about them. It feels like a full-circle moment for the band.
Other than that, I lived up in Kingston, NY for about five years, and moved to New York City back in 2023. I've been working in bars and restaurants, and now I'm back to just putting the band as the first most important thing in my life in a lot of ways, or just prioritizing that and trying to get out on the road more and make this a big part of my life. It brings me a lot of joy, honestly.
LUNA: You mentioned half of the songs are around 10 years old or older. How does it feel to be playing them now? Do you feel like they still resonate?
CHRISTIE: Absolutely. I feel like some of them were maybe like I wrote them back then, but I revisited them over the years and recontextualized them a little bit or maybe tried a different drum beat. It feels more unified, and I think those old songs really sit well with the other handful of songs that I wrote before I moved to New York. They hang nicely next to one another, and it feels like a very definitive version of the band, or of the sound that we've been working toward for the last however many years. It feels less like a solo project or a bedroom pop project, because that was where we fell in the beginning. Now it feels like we’re just a rock band, which is what I’ve always wanted for the project.
LUNA: A lot of these songs sound heavier than Fraternal Twin’s previous releases. Did the older songs already sound heavier then?
CHRISTIE: Some of them not so much. But the thing is that some of those older songs, when I wrote them, I didn't use any distortion or anything because I actually could never get a distortion pedal to sound good. So I said, okay, screw it, I’m not going to use one then. At some point, I think maybe during the pandemic, I started understanding gain staging and distortion. Now we’re a lot louder. That was the other thing during COVID: because we were all so cooped up, I really wanted to be in a loud rock band in this way that I hadn't really wanted before, and now we get pretty heavy sometimes.
LUNA: What does your songwriting process look like?
CHRISTIE: For some of these songs, I definitely was just writing tons and tons of lyrics until I was able to fit these verses next to each other in a way that made sense, and exploring language in different ways that I haven't really done before. I mean, I think the images and the language are maybe a little more abstract, even though there's some sort of purpose behind—it doesn't feel like just gibberish or word vomit.
In some of the older songs on the record—from 2015, 2016—the lyrics are a little more literal or more linguistically straightforward. I feel like I've gotten better with wordplay and exploring different images and stuff like that. I'm putting a lot more thought into singing, and it takes longer to finish these songs for sure. But I think the results are pretty rewarding. The song we're releasing on August 5—it's a song called “Medicine”—is probably the best song I've ever written. It's a very meaningful song to me.
I think I know a song is finished these days if something clicks and I feel like I've learned something about myself, and I'm like, Okay, now I think this is done. Not every song is like that, but I feel like the most important ones are, like I unraveled something about myself. I think that it's a very motivating factor in why I like to do this, or why I choose to write songs. It's informing myself of something about myself that I maybe didn't know before, or maybe processing some sort of emotion.
LUNA: When was “Medicine” written?
CHRISTIE: I wrote it a few months before I moved to New York, back in 2023. It was the first song I had written in a long time that really felt like I identified with musically and lyrically. When I wasn't doing well emotionally, I was struggling to tap into my own identity and my creativity, and once I wrote “Medicine," the songs just started falling out. I started making a lot more music again, music that felt real, and it felt like me. I'm excited to share that music. It’ll be a while for that, but it helped me finish writing this record, and then it also really kind of wrote another record that we haven't gotten to yet.
LUNA: What role did patience play in the making of Halo Fell Forever?
CHRISTIE: I feel like I've been more intentional about what I want to say and spent more time on the lyrics. Also, we’re definitely tapping into slowcore in a way that we haven't necessarily always done before. We kind of slowed everything down, taking our time with all this and building the elements.
LUNA: Does that mean this record felt less rushed in comparison to the other recording processes?
CHRISTIE: No. We've always taken kind of a while to finish records. We'll record it and then we'll come back to it months later. It also has to do with saving backup money to pay for a recording and all that sort of stuff, which is why I want to do the next thing live, instead of taking a year to finish a record with piecemeal coming in and out of the studio when I'm not working. Just banging it out in a week is what I want to do next. I’m hoping that we have another record done in the next year. I plan on doing a lot more music, and not disappearing for 10 years (laughs).
