Last month, Alexandra James walked onstage at at the Hollywood Palladium, looked out over the sold-out crowd and knew that Satan worked in mysterious ways.
Back in July, her L.A. band Twin Temple — famed for diabolical, occult-y riffs on doo-wop and girl-group rock — was booked to tour with country star Charley Crockett. Crockett had somehow missed the memo that the band behind singles like “Let’s Have a Satanic Orgy” might prove controversial. He dropped Twin Temple just before the tour (“I thought they were like Black Sabbath, but they ain’t. Not today, Satan,” Crockett said at the time).
But there’s no rest for the wicked. A week later, Jack White, moved by their plight and inspired by their sound, offered them an opening slot on his Palladium stand instead — “Get in front of me, Satan!” White implored.
At the Palladium, James and her bandmate/husband Zachary took the stage in all-black leather, with thigh-high boots, swords, an inverted crucifix necklace and a giant silver Baphomet pendant. Alexandra grinned as she recounted the recent tour debacle to the crowd.
“I think we traded up!” she yelled to howls and horns thrown in the audience.
“It just felt like a wicked Cinderella story,” Alexandra said backstage, just before the show. “We’ve been harassed and pulled off things for our entire career. It’s always been like, ‘Oh, great, someone’s sending me death threats. Do we need to buy a gun?’ But all the other times it’s happened, there’s never been anything beautiful that’s grown out of it.”
After a decade of terrifying squares, avoiding religious stalkers and navigating label purgatory, Twin Temple might finally be at the precipice of what they’ve long manifested — rock stardom. With a beautifully performed new LP, “Doomed Lovers,” which places their sound in the lineage of classic country, the duo finally has an infernal wind at its back.
When Twin Temple released its debut, 2018’s “Brings You Their Signature Sound … Satanic Doo-Wop,” the band had the blessing and curse of being a genre unto themselves. The pair were completely captivating, as artists steeped in both Phil Spector production and Kenneth Anger imagery (and as couple-goals for anyone whose teenage bedroom had a pin-up of Glenn Danzig). Their maleficent Ronettes angle was funny and self-aware, but utterly sincere about the true promise of Satanism — autonomy, knowledge, freedom.
The band became a favorite opening act for arena-scale hard rock bands, opening for Grammy favorites Ghost and Danzig himself. But the paranoid backlash came just as quickly. After Alex Jones devoted a segment of his conspiracy show “InfoWars” to Twin Temple, stalkers broke into their house in L.A.
“They took cardboard boxes out of our recycling that I had torn up, and they taped them back together serial killer style and filled them with Bibles, then left,” Zachary said.
After the tumult of the Crockett incident — this time amid the fever-swamp vigilante era of the second Trump presidency — they worried they might have to go through all of it again.
The incident “absolutely could have had the whole Christian extremist community coming after us,” Alexandra said. Crockett “was pointing the finger, like ‘These guys are the embodiment of evil,’ which is what happened last time, too,” she said. “How was this gonna turn out?”
Better than they had ever expected, it seems. A debut TV gig on “The Daily Show” followed soon after. There was something invigorating watching a band deemed too evil and provocative for a country tour who got an even bigger offer to spit fake blood in each other’s mouths on stage. At the Palladium, after they made out amid a wail of saxophone riffs, they played their walkout music — the Louvin Brothers’ ballad “Satan Is Real,” here played as a delicious affirmation.
(Crockett, for his part, blamed production and content issues for the change-up. “I noticed some of the things they’d been doing on stage and after thinking about it for a couple days I decided to cut ‘em loose,” Crockett wrote on social media at the time. “We told ‘em the vibe just wasn’t right for an all-ages audience, and we paid ‘em in full.”)
Alongside Macklemore, who turned his Ed Sheeran tour dismissal into a global rallying event for Palestinian rights, and Olivia Rodrigo’s unflinching advocacyfor abortion rights at her Daisy Chain Fields festival, it was proof that music can still move people to stand up for what they believe in.
“I just felt like America is not dead yet, right? We still have these things, and they’re still worth fighting for,” Alexandra said. “There are still a lot of people in this country, for all its issues, who believe in these fundamental ideals of creative freedom.”
That artistic freedom is on full display in “Doomed Lovers,” the band’s most elegant yet forlorn LP yet. Produced with outlaw-country superstar Shooter Jennings, Twin Temple nails the midcentury “countrypolitan” mood when the genre adapted to pop and took on elements of R&B, rock and orchestration.
Drawing from Roy Orbison, Patsy Cline and Owen Bradley (the producer known as Nashville’s Phil Spector), the band tracked the LP with Jennings in his room at Sunset Sound, a rare surviving grand dame of L.A. studio history. “We got to record piano on the same one Prince used for ‘Purple Rain,’ ” Zachary said. “It was such a positive thing for us to have that trust, it reminded us of why we make music,” Alexandra added.
With a roster of A-list session warriors, including drummers Matt Chamberlain and Jay Bellerose, their backing band and orchestra lend a grandeur to the LP that finally matched their aesthetic ambitions and gothic lore.
“They’re such sweet and generous people, and such good musicians and writers. I feel like that side of them was bound to take center stage eventually,” Jennings said. He discovered the band after they moved into a Silver Lake studio he used to work from, and he caught one of their their famed Halloween shows soon after. “I was knocked out by the music they were making, which was so interesting on the conceptual side, but musically exploring these really old themes,” he said. Jennings brought both members in for session work before tracking “Doomed Lovers,” which he described as “candelabra country meets Lee Hazlewood.”
“It was a perfect storm for them to have this timeless album, but that element of danger intact. That’s the hardest thing for anyone to achieve,” he said. “They garner all this fear and drama, but at same time, the music is delivering on such a serious note. ‘Haunt Me’ reminds of of Ray Charles. People are freaked out by anyone saying stuff that’s different, but those people become American icons.”
They wrote the album during a rough time personally, as they struggled to get out of a stymied label deal that cost them four years between records. The ordeal almost ended the band while waiting it out. (“It was soul-crushing, just beating our heads against the wall,” Zachary said.) Their beloved dog died at 16, which the couple taxidermied and mounted in their home so they can still commune with the pup.
Most painfully, Alexandra’s grandmother, a cherished relationship in her life, died while they were writing the LP, which inspired the record’s heartrending closer “Nothing Matters.”
“That was about my grief and feeling like I’ll never be over that, and that without that person, nothing matters anymore,” she said. “It’s about depression and when you’re alienated from yourself, and the many days where I looked in the mirror and I didn’t know who I was without this huge part of my identity. I kind of reframed it in the context of a classic love song, but really, it’s the same thing.”
The record’s high-lonesome reverbs and subtly inventive chord twists (and Alexandra’s showstopping vocals) give songs like “Love You to Death” and the title track a gravity and timelessness that transcend their sinister aesthetic. They released “Doomed Lovers” independently on their own Pentagrammaton imprint, with a distribution deal through the powerful but artist-forward Secretly group. If any record in their catalog can get them to a new tier of success, it’ll be this one.
“That dangerous element has been missing from music for so long. To have any element of danger around a beautiful record — that’s the trick,” Jennings said. “They have controversy, but just like Bowie, metal or Miles Davis did. When you see someone making music they know will be a hard sell to pop culture, you know they’re doing it for other reasons than to be rich and popular; they’re doing it for their love of craft. They’ve figured out a new angle on every facet of American music, and I think they’re the most exciting band to work with for that.”
Can such a visibly transgressive band, even one so deeply attuned to American music history, be rock stars today? There’s some precedent. Their late, beloved Dolly Partonwas a self-invented, child-free artistic genius and unabashed sex symbol in a devoted but open-minded marriage, who brought the lamplight of literature to children. Dolly Parton, a secret Satanic icon?
“Pretty much,” Alexandra laughed. “Everything you just said is satanic as hell.”
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