I am a chronic overthinker about everything that doesn’t matter. A manicure gets four days of deliberation. A lease in a city I’ve visited once gets signed on a Tuesday afternoon because the kitchen had good light. So picture me last spring, three drinks deep at a friend’s birthday, watching a guy across the room I’d been circling all night the way you circle a decision you’ve already made and refuse to admit you’ve made. He leaned in and asked if I wanted to get out of there, and my brain did the thing it always does, ran the whole tape, every reason to say no like the work thing in the morning and the friend who’d warned me about him. Then the music got loud and the part of me that argues just clocked out, and I grabbed my jacket and left with him before I could file an appeal. I hate when a feeling makes the decision faster than my own anxiety can. I really do. That quiet, the one that lands the second you stop negotiating with yourself, is the whole thing Twin Phase bottled on ‘One Way Out.’ It’s feel-good indie pop with a contemporary R&B pulse running underneath and the damn thing makes certainty sound sexy as hell.
Marcus Assenmacher comes in already mid-stare. “Step in the light / I see you watching me / Shadows move slow / But my heart’s at speed” is eye contact committing a small crime. He’s clocking that he’s being clocked, and the gap between how slow the room looks and how fast everything’s actually going is the most honest thing anyone’s ever written about wanting somebody across a bar. I’ve been on both ends of that look. Nobody is fooling anybody. Then he warms the whole frame up with “Gold on your skin / Like the city’s glow / Every move you make / Says you wanna go,” and the read goes both ways. No diary entry about mixed signals. No three verses of “does he or doesn’t he.” Thank fuck, because some songs flirt around the point until I want to leave, and this one walks straight at it with its shoes already off.
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By the chorus he quits asking and starts issuing instructions. “One way out / Take it with me / Set your body free / No time to doubt / Tonight’s the fire / We burn it out” is the mission statement, and it’s a dare. There’s no pros-and-cons list, no group chat consulted, no stalling. There’s a fire and a shrinking amount of night and an open door, and the only correct answer is yes. I will always respect a chorus that refuses to act confused about what it wants. That’s rarer than it should be.
His second verse turns the burner up without making a mess of it. “Heat in the air / Got my pulse on fire / Your lips play a game / That pulls me higher” is doing a lot with very little, and that game he’s talking about is just chemistry doing its actual job. This is where the R&B underneath the indie pop shows itself, the vocal leaning into the sensation while the groove handles everything else. Then the floor straight up vanishes. “Steps in the dark / I can’t see the floor / Clock’s ticking loud / I can’t feel the sound / We’re breaking away / When the lights go down” is what happens when good chemistry stops being cute and starts rewiring your wiring. Time gets loud. Sound goes mute. Damn, I know that exact short-circuit. You walk in with a hundred thoughts and walk out running on one instinct, and somebody really should put a warning label on it.
Then the groove takes the wheel and stops pretending to be in a hurry to talk. “Can’t stop / Won’t stop / ’til the night is through / Every beat / Every breath / Pulling close to you / In the smoke / In the noise / We can disappear” is built like a pulse picking up speed with little clipped phrases stacking until they fall into one idea. Vanishing together. That’s the actual fantasy here, the part where you and one specific person carve out a pocket nobody else can get into, and Assenmacher mixed it so you’re inside the pocket too, slightly sweaty, fully complicit. Being unreachable to everyone except one person is the sexiest amenity a night can offer and I don’t make the rules.
His bridge brings the only stakes the song ever needed. “Caught in a fever / No turning back / Your eyes say the truth / Don’t fade to black” is the line that gets me every time because the fever is the entire point and the no-turning-back is a selling feature. That little plea at the end – the quiet “don’t fade to black” – is the one soft crack in a track this self-assured. Stay and keep your eyes open before the sun makes it weird. It’s the closest the song comes to admitting it wants the night to count for something, and it goes down all the softer for how cocky everything around it sounds.
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Twin Phase is the project of songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Marcus Assenmacher, and ‘One Way Out’ marks his first solo release in over seventeen years, which is a hell of a way to break a silence. He built this himself, self-produced, a personal return to music that’s slowly widening into something bigger through a web of collaborators and longtime creative relationships he’s collected across his whole career. The project leans on funk basslines and groove-forward indie pop that swings between late-night abandon and something more reflective underneath – pulling from the same gene pool that gave us Roosevelt and The Wombats. For a guy stepping back in after seventeen years, he came back sounding like he never bothered to leave.
So, that birthday. I left calmer than I walked in, which was honestly rude of me because I had already mentally committed to a dramatic night. The inbox was still a disaster in the morning. The friend who warned me was right about a couple of things and I regret nothing anyway. Nothing outside me had changed, and that’s the irritating little truth of it. Sometimes the right person doesn’t fix the chaos. They just make the exit sign light up. Marcus found his one way out after seventeen years of quiet, and the rest of us get to find ours every time the noise drops and one clear move is all that’s left standing.
