Deep Dive: Twin Rains – The Evil That You Know (Let it Go)

Twin Rains is a Toronto-based outfit whose music can loosely be termed dream pop, though new single The Evil That You Know (Let it Go) has nods to gothic rock that are equally hard to resist.

We asked the band to give us a breakdown of the track, which in a nod to the old days has a B-side titled Quick Sickness, as part of our ongoing Deep Dive series. The tech heads among you will love the insight to the SM48!

Genesis of the song and lyrics

We write a lot of music and some compositions come easier than others. Sometimes we’ll labour over a production for years; other times the whole process—writing, arranging, recording, mixing—happens fast.

This song was written and demoed October of last year, so it’s very fast (for us) to be releasing in May—it came together really quickly and we were trying to honour that. We started to overproduce it at one point but made a decision to get out of our own way and strip it back again because we felt there was a direct quality in the original demo that was starting to feel obscured.

The lyrics look at self-deception, which is a common theme in our work. It’s not about pointing a finger at someone else and saying “You’re evil.” It’s about how hard it is to tell the truth to yourself. Our psyches have these elaborate, sophisticated defence systems in place.

Instrumentation and recording

The guitars, synths and vocals were all recorded in our home studio. The vocals were recorded on an SM48 which felt crazy to do but we tried condensers and the recordings from the 48 just had more urgency and grit. (There was a lot about the process of making this song where we just tried to trust what felt like it was working and challenged ourselves to steer away from obsessing over making it better and better and better—it wasn’t easy to do that).

The drums were recorded by our friend Alex Bonenfant at his studio, Dreamhouse, in Toronto, and our drummer, Greg Smith, really brought it to life. The track was mastered by Brock McFarlane at CPS Mastering in Vancouver.

Where does the song fit within your wider body of work?

That’s a good question—a hard question. We’ve released over thirty songs—two LPs and some singles—and we’re categorized as a dream pop band but we definitely do a bit of genre-hopping.

Our first LP Automatic Hand is a softer record with dance and trip hop moments. Our second LP Unreal City is more angsty with some psych rock influences and you can hear the new song’s lineage in tracks from that album like Strawberry Moon and Unreal City, as well as in our 2023 singles You’re the Only One, and Laws of the Universe.

We’re currently working on our third LP which is going in more of a groove-based direction, so this may be the last overtly rocking track you hear from us for a while.

What are you up to in the coming months?

We’ll be labouring on our next LP and releasing more singles in the meantime. Right now, we are finishing another single which will be released in June with a music video we shot and directed ourselves.

The Evil That You Know (Let it Go) and the Twin Rains back catalogue can be downloaded on Bandcamp and is streaming on Spotify, SoundCloud, and YouTube. For news on the upcoming single and video, follow Twin Rains on Facebook and Instagram.

Header photo by Phil Baljeu