Fraternal Twin

BIOGRAPHY

For Tom Christie, patience is the greatest virtue. You can hear this in the entirety of the decade-plus of music he’s made as Fraternal Twin, but especially in the band’s current lineup, in which he’s joined by Marco Spodek (drums), Mariah Houston (guitar), and Forrest Philpot (bass). The songs unfurl at a tectonic pace; every shimmering guitar and vocal melody — no matter how beautiful — creeps along glacially, the low end groaning and creaking under the weight of Christie’s existential musings. Eventually, amid the delicate swirling of these winding pieces, they explode into distortion and noise. But for these moments of clarity and catharsis, you’re going to have to wait. 

Fraternal Twin’s new album Halo Fell Forever is a product of this patient approach. This is true in a literal sense — this is Christie’s first record for the project since 2016’s Homeworlding, and about half of the songs were originally written around the time of that album. But it’s also true in a more spiritual one: songs like “Whirlpool” and “Medicine” feel murkier and more mysterious than anything Christie has written before, both in the labyrinthine arrangements of guitar melodies that spiderweb across Spodek’s chest-rattling percussion and the imagistic, opaque fragments of Christie’s lyrics. It’s not withholding, not exactly; these are songs — like Codeine’s heaviest or Mount Eerie’s most mystical — that demand close listening to the slow-moving parts, begging you to peel back the layers and reveal the songs’ glowing emotional cores. 

Christie describes the decade that led to this record as a period of searching. During that time, he uprooted his life and moved from Kingston to New York City in late 2023, a move that precipitated finally finishing this record and reconfiguring the lineup of the band. It was a period that was, by his admission, full of major detours and hard lessons. Halo Fell Forever, as a title, is in part a reference to this tumult — an evocation of time spent wandering in the wilderness. “It takes me back to this sort of fall from innocence I experienced years ago,” he says. “It shattered the way I saw the world for a while.” The record matches the uncertainty of this period — it’s heavy and unsettled, introspective and emotionally fraught. “Evil Eye,” for example, is shot through with a distortion more shattered than anything else in the Fraternal Twin repertoire. Though the record was recorded with producer Dan Howard before the current lineup of the band coalesced, it presages the band as a live force — crushing, exploratory, never offering up the easy answers or resolutions. 

But there are also moments of peace amid the turmoil. Halo Fell Forever, Christie says, is also about learning from mistakes, pressing onward in your convictions with the confidence that can only come from really working through your problems. It feels telling that there are tracks called “Metamorphosis” and “Lucidity” — it’s a record that’s full of tension but also moments of transformation and clarity. As a whole, Halo Fell Forever is a work of maturity and growth, reflecting on hard times while also clearly setting its eyes on the clear path forward. And for Christie, that path is also one that’s going to result in a lot more activity from the band. “I don’t plan on disappearing again anytime soon,” he says. “Expect a lot more music from this band in the coming years.”