twen - fate euphoric

TWEN have built their world from the ground up. Without management, label or a bankroll behind them, they lowered their overhead costs by moving into a van full-time. Two songwriters, Jane Fitzsimmons and Ian Jones, decided the best way to make music was to build the universe around it themselves. They live on wheels, guided by a drive to write, record, and release music that lives in the hazy space between optimism and collapse. Their fifth release and third full-length, Fate Euphoric, arrives today, November 4. After consulting an astrologer to determine key release dates, they purposefully timed their album about personal/collective fate to land on Election Day; a practice known as Electional Astrology. The act fits lockstep with the album’s lyrics that often rely on fate to cope with the overwhelming powerlessness of today’s techo-feudal society.

TWEN’s music lives in contradiction. It’s bright and blissed out, yet carries a darker undercurrent. It shimmers like dream pop but hits with a sharper edge. Stereogum called their sound “similarly clean-lined and catchy, channeling classic janglers like the Smiths and Sundays but with a bit of a modern Alvvays sheen.” Fate Euphoric moves through those moods like changing weather.

There is self-assured confidence infused throughout the record, but particularly with lead single “Godlike”. The track carries itself effortlessly, drifting in a shoegaze breeze. “Tumbleweed” dropped October 21st. The video is set in a mirrored room that feels both endless and intimate. The saturated colors and reflections turn the space into a kind of dreamworld–raw, joyful, and unpolished. It’s a snapshot of collective energy, where everything feels real and slightly unreal at once. It’s a realm you wish to step into, joining the world of collective utopia TWEN has created through their music, and made tangible through kinetic joy. 

“Prelude to Waterloo” comes in quickly, energetically, and the reverbed vocals blend each piece together. The way you’re carried to the following track, “Keep Your Company” immersed in plucked guitar, keeps the energy uplifted and alive. It feels like floating

Everything about TWEN is hands-on. Ian produces, engineers, and mixes their albums. Jane designs every visual element, from videos, to posters, to merch. They’ve printed their own shirts, booked their own tours, edited their own films. Their 2022 LP One Stop Shop wasn’t just a title, it was the truth. Even now, as their reach has expanded to a sold-out Red Rocks Amphitheatre show, opening arena tours, and having played 500+ shows across North America and Europe, they’ve kept full control. It’s proof you can exist outside the system and still make something that is current and alive.

Written across highways and coastlines, Fate Euphoric isn’t nostalgic, though it nods to Britpop, psych, and new wave. It sounds more like the past filtered through the noise of right now. Romanticizing the present instead of running from it. There’s melancholy here, but also motion. If One Stop Shop pointed out the problems of the 2020s from a first-person perspective, Fate Euphoric takes a bird’s-eye view, seeking comfort in the cosmic wheel that will always keep spinning.

TWEN are a band in flux, and that’s the point. The van is their home, but the studio is wherever the signal feels right. The fate might be uncertain, but for now, it’s euphoric.