Last year, Tom Christie released his debut album as Fraternal Twin, Skin Gets Hot. For its follow-up, Homeworlding, the project has solidified around a lineup that includes David Grimaldi and Max Restaino, and together they help bring Christie’s sliding, insular compositions to life. The album, which also features contributions from Long Beard’s Leslie Bear and Porches’ Aaron Maine, builds on the band’s debut by smoothing everything out: Homeworlding is placid and peaceful, evoking a feeling of warmth and comfort as though it’s trying to find some sense of calm against upheaval.

The album was primarily written during a move from upstate New York to New Jersey, and the songs reflect that transient atmosphere. Many of them are concerned with our corporeal forms and the ways we escape into each other or are defined by the absence of others. “Am I allowed to be you? Are you allowed to be me?” Christie asks on “False Alarm”; “Favorite Ghost” treats a feeling of guilt as a noose: “It’s all my fault/ It’s always my fault/ There’s some danger still with me/ Is it in you too?” On “Shapeless,” Christie expresses that he feels detached: “I was wrung out/ I felt shapeless/ So I try to make sense of my own reflection.” Homeworlding feels like its in search of that home world, a place where you can feel comfortable when you have no reason to feel very comfortable at all.

“Homeworlding is — in a lot of ways I think — a sort of sequel to the first Fraternal Twin record, Skin Gets Hot — in the way that it learns from its mistakes and moves forward, logically so,” Christie explains. “That wasn’t the intention going in, but here we are: where in the first you can kind of trace out degenerative qualities in the murk — the bleakness, bitterness, emotional decay — the second establishes a sort of temper and smoothness over several situations. There is definitely a sense of control, while at the same time, an acceptance of things like natural disorder and cosmic failure in our lives. It lives on its own terms, you might say. At the end of the day, I like to place these two records we’ve made so far side by side — as different sides of the same coin.” Listen below.

Tour Dates:
10/19 Brooklyn, NY @ Silent Barn
11/02 Northampton, MA @ 13 Queen
11/03 Boston, MA @ The Great Northern *
11/04 Hanover, VT @ Dartmouth College
11/05 Bennington, VT @ Bennington College
11/06 Montreal, QC @ Casa del Popolo *
11/07 Albany, NY @ The Low Beat
11/08 New Haven, CT @ TBA
11/09 Washington, DC @ Lilly Trotter Tea Lounge
11/10 Richmond, VA @ Underground Orchard
11/11 Philadelphia, PA @ All Nite Diner

* w/ Horse Jumper Of Love

Homeworlding is out 10/14 via Ghost Ramp. Pre-order it here.