“Steady blues bass, fuzzy ZZ Top-style guitars, and a classic horn section.”
Despite live music being very scarce, touring being put on hold, and uncertainty clouding the entire industry as a whole due to COVID-19, singles, EPs and full-length albums are still coming out on a weekly basis. It’s a bright spot for music in 2020, and fortunately this year has brought a bunch of gems for our ears in various genres.
Furthermore, all this new recorded music is a testament that artists and bands are willing to jump in the studio during the pandemic in order to let their creative juices flow. This has certainly been that case in Boston’s local scene, with a ton of great new tracks and records released since the dawn of stay-at-home orders.
The Devil’s Twins dropped “Bad Karma” on Oct. 30, their latest with standout vocalist Nikki Coogan showing her incredible range and Jeremiah Louf backing her up. His guitar riffs here are complemented by an awesome horn section, giving the song a seriously bombastic vibe. The recording was done on the heels of major changes for the group.
“In February of this year, we took the stage at Paradise Rock Club to play with Local H, an act that has always been high atop our list of favorite musicians,” Coogan said on the making of the single. “The room was packed and we were riding the endorphins of writing a collection of all new songs that for the first time were written along with our trumpet and sax players, Eric Ortiz and Aitan-Ben Joseph. After so many years of playing together, a new shine beckoned in an exciting era for us as a band. A few weeks later, the world came screaming to a halt and we knew we had to use this time to create something real. Sometimes when things get dark, writing and creating can help you say what you can’t find words for.”
“We used the time to lock ourselves up together in an A-frame house to finish writing and self-record all the work we’d been collecting,” Coogan added. “‘Bad Karma’ is the first track from those sessions and it brings you the familiar ‘feel good to be bad’ vibe that you lean into with our sound, along with brand new dynamics that have come to the front with our new lineup. We hope that the experience of sharing all these new tracks will bring us back together to scream, dance, and realize that although we are all so different, we all have so much in common too. That our voices deserve to be heard, and that as long as we have each other they will be.”
There’s a unifying element that’s evident in Coogan and Louf’s harmonies, an approach influenced by none other than one of the most iconic bands in music history. “We certainly took a cue from The Beatles on this one,” Louf said. “Similar to a song like ‘Come Together,’ ‘Bad Karma’ is less about what we’re singing and much more about how it sounds when we’re singing it. Something about combining the sound of a swing beat with a steady blues bass, fuzzy ZZ Top-style guitars, and a classic horn section while repeating the word ‘Bad’ upwards of 50 times that just feels so good.”
Rob Duguay is an arts & entertainment journalist based in Providence, RI who is originally from Shelton, CT. Outside of DigBoston, he also writes for The Providence Journal, The Connecticut Examiner, The Newport Daily News, Worcester Magazine, New Noise Magazine, Northern Transmissions and numerous other publications. While covering mostly music, he has also written about film, TV, comedy, theatre, visual art, food, drink, sports and cannabis.
