Twin Flames, the new record from Postdata, borrows its namesake from the centerpiece song on the album. “Twin Flames” is about a storm, but perhaps more importantly, it’s also about a fire burning through it: pillars and peaks of flame shooting up, merging, becoming one before a gust of wind renders them separate again, left alone to stab at the night sky. Paul Murphy, who leads Postdata and east coast indie rock mainstays Wintersleep, says that sometimes being caught in a storm can be an instructive, freeing and powerful experience.
“You’re navigating this place… you can’t really see super far in front of you,” he says. “I kinda like that place.”
With Twin Flames, Murphy has created the most intimate and timeless Postdata record yet, a bright, compassionate text of major-key romanticism. Murphy says the record is inward-looking and “focused on creating or surrounding itself in hope and warmth.” “Maybe that’s why there’s an inordinate amount of love songs,” says Murphy. “I hope it’s offering that hope and warmth at the same time that it searches for it, through that search, even.”
This tone is realized thanks in part to both process and content. Twin Flames was recorded and co-produced in isolation by Murphy in Halifax/K’jipuktuk and Ali Chant (PJ Harvey, Perfume Genius, Algiers) in Bristol, UK. But the record’s words and arrangements span an almost genreless spectrum: romantic fire-side shuffles, riotous, acid-tongued self-deprecation-rock, keys-led post-pop ballads, humming pop-rock vigor, and patient, spoken-word tenderness curl around each other from track to track.
Murphy’s vocal melodies here are similarly ambitious and keenly realized, in part a product of recording his takes alone before sharing them with Chant. For Murphy, an empty room is a more intrinsically forgiving and comfortable space to create. “When you’re tracking vocals alone there’s no time limitations and no one to run through an idea with… you end up having to trust your gut instinct more at some level and you have that time & space to really get lost in the performance” he says.
This naturally becomes a space to safely experiment too. On “Twin Flames,” which was initially conceived as an instrumental, Murphy’s voice stays in a rare low register, hardly engaging in melody, rolling through like gentle spring thunder: “We were never lost, we were only ever hiding/Waiting out the storm until we became it/Til there was nothing left/Only love and breath.”
The track and its concepts speak to “the idea of another person being this mirror that allows you to see yourself truly,” says Murphy. Sometimes, it’s a person; sometimes, it’s a song. “Maybe it doesn’t quite fit the definition,” he continues, “but I’ve always looked at the act of songwriting as a mirror: a way to check in on myself and see myself more clearly.”
Postdata has always been a relational outfit, with friends and relatives cycling in and out; Murphy toured with Blonde Redhead on their latest record, and Blonde Redhead’s Simone Pace contributed to Postdata’s 2018 release, Let’s Be Wilderness. Fittingly, Twin Flames is a similar meeting of old and new. While Chant is a new collaborator, a slew of familiars contributed sounds to the record including Wintersleep’s Tim D’Eon and longtime friend Andy Monaghan of Frightened Rabbit. The record’s harsh cover photo—a shot of striated rock, smooth and rolling like waves—was taken by Bill Curry, a photographer from Murphy’s coastal Nova Scotia hometown, Yarmouth.
After record-opener “Haunts” floats in on sparse, hollowed percussion, bass, and electronics bedding Murphy’s voice, “Inside Out” arrives with a light gallop of keys and programmed beats, a lush, minimalist pop introduction that gives way to a thrill of snare, horns, and what Murphy describes as his take on a K-Pop melody. It’s proudly saccharine and unabashed, which Murphy says is unusual. “Normally if I write songs that have really catchy melodies, I’ll fuck ‘em up a little bit with dark imagery lyrically,” he says. “I gave myself a test to try to make it really open-hearted and really inviting.”
Follow-up “Nobody Knows” is equally infectious (if not more so), a late night kitchen-party acoustic bop that finds Murphy rhyming off a laundry list of faults and failings: “I’m not good when the party’s packed/I’m not good when there’s nobody left/I’m not good when I’m all by myself, I fear for my health.” Murphy is joined on the second verse by affirmations of “Not good!” hollered by a backing chorus line of friends and family.
The intent isn’t self-pity, says Murphy. It’s self-acceptance via celebration of imperfections and “just trying to get through,” a model Murphy credits to late friend and Frightened Rabbit vocalist Scott Hutchison. “That was one of the great things about his songwriting, this not being perfect and celebrating that,” says Murphy.
“Everyone has flaws. You can think of yourself as not being something, and think of it a lot of the time as a negative, but it’s kind of great to let your guard down and accept that nobody is perfect.”
From unbridled romance and warm summer love, to wit and bitter cynicism, to rain and fire, to death and what comes after: all of these are cradled by the Atlantic before being bashed upon rocks like those on the cover of Twin Flames. They leave their marks, and Murphy—gone from Yarmouth, but somehow always there, too—interprets and transposes them. With a new record, Murphy and Postdata are as committed to modern translations of these inevitabilities of life as they are to their traditional intimacy and weight.
This is perhaps why Twin Flames is coloured equally by joy and yearning: one is hardly over before the other begins, like flames that perpetually meet, split, and meet again; always connected.