“The Nightmare,” the opening track of their new album, reveals the problem almost instantly. It’s built around a bubbly, effervescent ascending melody that reminds me of SOPHIE’s “Nothing More to Say” with all the fun ripped out, while a flimsy voice sings, “Welcome to the nightmare.” The vocals scan as inhuman, the drums don’t really do much, and all the synths seem just a little off, everything brushed with a plasticky sheen that sounds like it came right off the assembly line, made by robotic arms for robotic arms.
That uneasy feeling settles over the rest of Infinite Now like suffocating humidity. No matter how hard the duo tries to get things going, the spark never catches: Build-ups and drops land with a thud, because how can you have payoff without tension? The hooks are aggravating because the vocals are aggravating, like on “Lose Control,” a pale imitation of Daft Punk’s “One More Time,” that group’s painstaking ingenuity replaced by “it’s just a tool” deflection. Worse yet, the album is mired in a mid-tempo slog that feels like it was designed for late-morning Ibiza zombies. “Follow” is like something tech-house stalwart Jamie Jones could have cooked up in his sleep in 2009, far removed from the genius of Two Shell’s “home” or even their latter-day collaboration with FKA twigs, “Talk to Me.”
Even if it used some of the same AI tools, “Talk to Me” was fun because, at that point, it exemplified the group’s greatest sonic tricks. They had a way of abusing filters and volume fluctuations to create club music that felt like it was always in flux—thrillingly volatile, vocals stretched thin and passed through a sieve. But the possibility that these new tracks were augmented by AI saps the novelty, in the same way that an AI video of a raccoon climbing a string of Christmas lights isn’t cute in the slightest. For a while, Two Shell’s antics—like sending in decoy DJs pretending to mix—were divisive, but at least the music was exciting. By now, the project feels cynical. Not only can they not be bothered to show up to their own gigs, but they’d also like us to believe they can’t even muster the energy to make their own songs.
