“It’s complicated” is the second full-length album by Twins, released on November 21 through a loose coalition of DIY labels including Through Love Records, Zegema Beach, No Funeral, Fireflies Fall, Clever Eagle, and Desperate Infant. It follows “Soon”, their 2020 debut that arrived quietly and then travelled far beyond its initial circle, reaching listeners across Europe, North America, and Asia. Almost five years later, the band return with eight tracks that function less like separate songs and more like a single, internally fractured body of work.
Two tracks preceded the album. “Goodbye” appeared first, marking the band’s return after years of silence. “Cuts” followed via a Zegema Beach sampler, a cautious re-entry rather than a statement of reinvention. Now, with the album fully out and December already half gone, Twins share a complete track-by-track commentary — the core of this special material — that clarifies what this record is actually about, and why it had to take this shape.
Twins formed in 2017 and consist of Tom (drums), Steffen (bass), Jakob (guitar and vocals), and TJ (guitar and vocals). From the beginning, they were uninterested in clean genre borders. Their music pulls from post-hardcore, screamo, math rock, noise, indie, and punk, but rarely settles long enough to feel stable. That restlessness was already present on “Soon”, a record that processed therapy, panic attacks, separation, and a suicide attempt in close, inward-facing terms. With “It’s complicated”, the perspective shifts.
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Tom describes the album as a turning point rather than a continuation. Where “Soon” dealt almost exclusively with his own internal collapse and recovery, the new record looks outward — not optimistically, but attentively. After finishing that earlier process, he became acutely aware that “I am not the only one with problems.” The album grows out of that realization, and the weight that comes with it.
The lyrics are rooted in concrete losses. A close friend who lost her daughter. Parents losing their parents in quick succession. Jakob losing his best friend to suicide. A grandfather’s farewell letter. A phone call with a breaking voice. A birthday that suddenly reframes time as something already running out. These are not abstract themes stitched together for effect; they are moments that accumulated while the band was writing, rehearsing, stopping, and starting again over several years.
For Jakob, “It’s complicated” is about the complexity of life shaped by love, illness, decay, and death — and the specific helplessness that comes with watching people disappear, whether slowly or abruptly. The record returns repeatedly to sickness, loss, and suicide, but it avoids melodrama by staying close to consequences rather than spectacle. The focus is on what remains, what echoes, and how those echoes interfere with everyday life.
That sense of interference also defines their craft. The band repeatedly describe the album as a long player in the literal sense — eight tracks that are “actually one”, with no clear borders and no obvious extraction points. Songs bleed into each other, reappear in altered forms, or resolve ideas introduced earlier without calling attention to themselves. Fragmentation is part of the structure, not a flaw to be hidden.
Instrumentally, the record is intentionally unstable. Tom calls it “wonderfully imperfect”, loud and impulsive, willing to make mistakes rather than smooth them out. The band leaned into the idea of the album as an outdated format, resisting the logic of short, isolated highlights. Listening to one track outside the whole, they admit, means losing part of its meaning.
“Goodbye” sits at the emotional center of that structure. Jakob describes it as a step-by-step reconstruction of the mental process following his friend’s suicide — confusion, guilt, anger, disbelief, and the slow realization that none of those states change what has already happened. He recalls the moment his friend’s twin brother called him, the sound of sobbing that almost resembled laughter, and the way that sound stayed with him. “Goodbye” does not resolve that memory; it circles it, frustrated by its own inability to offer closure.
Elsewhere on the album, the writing expands beyond single events into overlapping narratives. Stories of cancer and chemotherapy sit alongside attempts to regain direction after personal collapse. Conversations drift apart without either side truly listening. Relationships end not because of hostility, but because imagined futures no longer align. Parenthood introduces a new kind of fear — not for oneself, but for those suddenly dependent on you.
Even when the album reaches its final track, it avoids framing itself as recovery or redemption. The closing piece is described by the band as a conclusion, but explicitly “not a happy ending”. It marks the end of a shared period rather than the arrival at clarity. Depression, suicide, and loss are addressed from multiple perspectives: those who cannot continue, and those left behind struggling with guilt for still being alive, still functioning, sometimes even feeling okay.
What ties all of this together is a recurring acceptance of contradiction. The album insists on ambivalence — love coexisting with resentment, responsibility with exhaustion, hope with resignation. Tom quotes a line that already appeared on “Soon”: “And it all could be a lot easier but then we wouldn’t call that life.” On “It’s complicated”, that line feels less like a personal mantra and more like an observation made reluctantly, after watching the same cycles repeat across different lives.
Rather than presenting these themes track by track here, the band have chosen to publish their full commentary separately. That detailed breakdown follows next, unpacking how each song contributes to the larger structure, how certain musical decisions emerged, and where specific lines come from. What matters at this stage is the shape of the whole: a record built as controlled chaos, attentive to detail, resistant to simplification, and willing to sit with questions that never fully resolve.
Below, the complete track-by-track commentary expands on these ideas in depth.
it’s_complicated
Words by the band
FAILURE always seemed to us to be the most fitting introduction to this strange record, as it kind of “slaps the listeners in the face” right away and opens up quite a range of things that we wanted to try out and exhaust on this second album. It is is rousing and direct, intricate and peculiar – there is screaming and singing (unusually much by our standards…) and in my memory we were incredibly in the flow during the writing process!
Lyrically FAILURE is a song about losing hope when the whole world seems dark and bitter while you also have to deal with losing people and relationships in your personal life. It tries to tell a story of fighting against your own intrusive and dark thoughts on multiple fronts, where an already painful reality collides with personal suffering and creates a feeling of inevitable FAILURE and loss of friends, loved ones and the important moments you miss while fighting your own demons.
Long story short: we are really happy with the beginning of the record, because it is coherent and yet confidently opens up the experimental space of possibilities (inbetween mathy screamo, post hardcore, emo-stuff and noisy indie parts) of this entire album. Welcome to it’s_complicated, it is a real pleasure for us to welcome you and take you through the record.
GOODBYE continues almost seamlessly where FAILURE left off, although the song is much older, even one of the oldest of the whole album. It was written mostly in 2022, when the first rehearsals after COVID were possible again. It had no real lyrics planned when we decided to hit the studio and was finished shortly before recording it, telling the story of one of Jakob’s best friend deciding to end his own life after years of mental health struggle. It is almost a step-by-step recreation of his emotional and mental process trying to to come to terms with the loss, grief and guilt of losing someone you’ve known almost your entire life.
GOODBYE has grown into a very special track – its painful and heavy & involuntarily brings back a memory to our minds: during the spoken word part of Jakob everyone sat in the control room with tears in their eyes and could not find any words.
Instrumentally this second chapter of our album – which is actually one big journey without any skips – is dark, driving and chaotic. It gets kind of weird at times and evokes reminiscences of Cockroaches II (from our first album “soon”). Especially the drum-driven beat at the beginning, the Screamo-vibe in combination with the instrumentally rather light-footed emo rock parts, in direct contrast to various odd-feels and a wonderfully shifted 11/8 part, has always made GOODBYE one of our favorite songs to play.
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STORIES is strangely ambivalent – kind of the quietest song on the entire album, without actually being “quiet.” The long, sustained section with Tom’s increasingly haunting vocals, however, was something new and daring for us. The power here doesn’t come from riffs and harsh distortion, but builds as tension that practically follows the vocals. Furthermore, STORIES starts very distinctly with the intro beat, which is complex and layered without losing its backbeat function and has one of our drummers favorite fills at 1:08. Sweet!
Lyrically STORIES tries to be true to its name, telling two different stories: One of losing and trying to find yourself again, being able to grow and find a way forward. And another one of watching somebody fighting the repercussions of cancer and chemotherapy, clinging to life so desperately and courageously, even though chances were slim and expectations low.
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Some thoughts on FOLLOW: One band we’ve always been able to agree on without any doubt is Kidcrash. Their albums are so brilliant and unique, and no other band in the screamo-math genre has ever come close to their intensity, authenticity, and effortless coolness. FOLLOW gives us some Kidcrash vibes here and there: especially in the intro, which I think we affectionately called the “Kidcrash part” while writing it! Furthermore, FOLLOW has probably the best math-pop-emo-section on the LP… Jakob’s vocal line is simply beautiful and heartmelting.
Regarding the lyrics: FOLLOW feels more like a conversation gone astray, like two people talking to each other without actually listening or responding to the other. On the one hand, Tom is describing the passing of his grandmother and is retelling the letter his grandfather left behind after he decided to take his own life to follow her one last time. On the other hand, Jakob is telling a story of self-loathing, sorrow and depressive episodes from almost completely losing touch with someone close because life just drifts apart sometimes.
PRESENCE emerges from a sample that always reminds me of good times together in the rehearsal room, silly antics among friends and fucked up pizza-orders. Its an instrumentally extremely versatile track: hard and vulnerable at the same time. Wild and harsh, yet somehow delicate and at times strangely captivating, or even bewildering. The lyrics revolve around the feeling of being stucked whereas the lives of people around you seem to move forward so effortlessly – while you still don’t know where to go.
As one of the oldest songs on the entire album, PRESENCE has often kind of shed its skin, acquired new facets, and over time became what it is today: a fascinating fragment of a shared exploratory process through a pandemic and some years of quite significant personal changes.
Five years after “soon” CUTS was our first sign of life on a fantastic “zampler” from Zegema Beach Records in August 2025. And we were damn nervous – not because we wanted to please anyone, but because we’d been the only ones we’d shared these new parts and ideas with for so long. Actually breaking that kind of protective barrier was exciting and intimidating, but I think we couldn’t have done it better than with this huge heart-wrenching crew-shout emo choir part in CUTS (from 1:20min) which still makes us shiver in really good way!
The whole recording of this song was so much fun and is forever associated with many good studio-memories. And from a vocal-perspective CUTS is about our relationships at the time. Jakob just became father three months prior and sings about trying to protect his loved ones from the fragility and the suffering that inevitably comes with existing, while Tom is reminiscing about breaking up a loving relationship because the ideas of a common future were just incompatible.
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SIGNS was the very first song we wrote for it’s_complicated. In fact, the song was almost finished when we recorded “soon.” Thats why, the song feels like the album’s warm, cozy, and totally familiar dinosaur-bone, if that makes any sense!? This song gave us direction, an idea of what we could be and what we could try. I think SIGNS had an incredible influence on how we subsequently wrote and thought creatively together. Furthermore, this song has an insane range, from mathy indie parts, jazzy bits to sawing noise sections! Its blending emotions with odd-time-beat-counting in such a self-assured/unique way that I hope someone, someday, will think, “Dude, that totally sounds like TWINS.”
SIGNS’ lyrics are about the process of losing people close to you, watching them go from friends to strangers or from being healthy to physically broken, all resulting in the anger and despair of realising that you’re slowly losing something that was once beautiful.
PROMISE is about depression, suicide and all the loss it is accompanied by. It is a song about parents losing their children, friends losing their friends, and people losing themselves in a sheer endless uphill battle… it tries to take the perspective of the ones that are unable to continue living their life, but also of those left behind feeling shame and guilt for still being alive and healthy and at times even happy while also mourning their losses.
This final chapter of it’s_complicated is a conclusion, not a happy ending. A final point for a period we all shared. It puts a stop to something that simply cannot last forever, which is why this song has a profound sadness within. Not just lyrically, but in general. At the same time PROMISE, at least instrumentally, is an ode to the embrace of failure that permeates this entire album. It reflects our deep conviction that we are allowed to do any part at any time, regardless of how outlandish, erratic, or unlistenable the result might be. And I think that’s the point that will always make us look back on this record with parental pride: we dared to do it. Even if the whole world might think it’s crap.
