Twin Shadow is probably the most personal album I've heard this year since Perfume Genius' "Learning," but "Forget" isolation is meant to be a shared experience, something warm and to be learned from, instrumentation limited mostly to fractured guitar lines and synths, carefully peaced together in a hotel room production by label mates and producers Grizzly Bear. Like the aforementioned masters, "Forget" pulsates its feelings through a senses of 80's new wave (this could have easily soundtracked Donnie Darko), a melancholy longing that Grizzly Bear have been unable to repeat since their debut.
Forget"'s opener "Tyrant Destroyed" is as introspective and based around the feeling of teenage isolation with its "I know you spent some time from the town to the city looking for your life to start, I know what you said when you were 15..." opening lines. Each song is filled with a story of teenage confusion and a time of discovery, the production is crisp and each familiar sound adds to drawing out your nostagia but also the regret of your youth and the hidden memories you'd care not to even admit to yourself. "Forget" at times may sound sweet and innocent but dig a little deeper to find the sinister underneath the glossy eighties synths to discover not is all well which cements the quality of Twin Shadow's pop songs. Flirting between secret crushes and forgotten flirtations to suggestions that these stories are not very good at all. Brought upon in "Yellow Balloons" lines "Secret Handshakes, the swimming hole, keep awake, we will not grow old." or the creepy "Tether Beat" and it's message of breakup "Does your heart still beat?"
Twin Shadow in the context of modern music makes a lot of sense, it's not a million miles from the 80s pop revivalists from Pains of Being Pure at heart, The Drums (at their darkest) or How to dress well on the surface, but "Forget" subject matter from the good to the bad to the ugly draws attention to repeated listening, as every heartbeat signifies something bigger, something more violent, something more tragic with every play, forcing you to recall every fumbling, every heartache and as Twin Shadow points out on the title track "this is all of it this is everyone..." and its also everything we've been trying to forget. 9/10
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