Vancouver-based drag performer and indie pop rock artist Dust Cwaine dances along that line with dire sincerity in their latest single, "Twin Lakes." A raw confession shrouded in lo-fi textures and soaring emotion, the track is the second release from Dust's forthcoming album of the same name, and it lands like a secret finally spoken out loud. Produced with Josh Eastman (Kylie V, Turunesh), "Twin Lakes" is stripped back but vast. It opens like a wound, and over time becomes a balm.
There is a hushed urgency in the production, a throbbing heartbeat that captures the emotional intensity of one who is navigating childhood scars, generational silence, and the strange, aching aftermath of loss. Cwaine incorporates the foundations of the novel into their upbringing in the Kootenays, a rural area locals call "Twin Lakes." The song extends even further a kind of solitude that transcends physical proximity: the emotional estrangement from a community, and perhaps most excruciatingly, from a parent. Dust's voice, which teeters between tender and defiant, recalls the incomplete nature of the relationship to their late father, who died in 2020, leaving behind a tangled mess of unanswered questions and unprocessed hurt.
"This song imagines what it might have been like to finally say what needed to be said," Dust added. It's music as a courageous encounter, a one-way conversation taken up with grace by someone who's put in the complex internal work. Its accompanying music video, directed by Luke Beach Brown, magnifies the song's emotional heft. Filmed at the Britannia Mine Museum, its industrial, rust-streaked surroundings become a metaphorical echo chamber where the weight of history and the remnants of trauma both reverberate. "Twin Lakes" is a reckoning camouflaged as a tune. On this release, Dust Cwaine demonstrates that the most personal stories are often the most powerful, and that healing sometimes sings. This is Dust Cwaine at their darkest and bravest. And it's only the beginning.
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