Twins on the Edge of Reason The most recent release from Shadow & Gudrun — and their most fully realised to date.

Twelve songs. Four Queen tracks, three from the lost Belgian progressive rock of Machiavel, one Harry Nilsson, one Sinatra, one ABBA, one Bésame Mucho, one Sea of Love. On paper, a covers album. In practice, something harder to categorise.

Every song on this record was chosen for the same reason: it contained a dialogue that hadn't been found yet. Shadow & Gudrun's method is consistent — take a song written for one voice, or one band, or one stadium, and find what happens when two people sing it to each other in a quiet room. The results are rarely what you expect.

"Love of My Life" loses its stadium and gains something more private and more devastating. "My Way" loses its crooner and gains a blues musician and rock-and-roll soldier who actually means every word — with the original 1968 Don Costa orchestra still playing underneath him. "The Day Before You Came" loses its ABBA dance beat entirely and gains a menacing wall of overdubbed voices in the chorus that turns a 1982 pop single into something close to a Greek tragedy. "Seaside Rendezvous" gains a mouth-brass section performed by two people who are clearly trying not to laugh. "Teo Torriatte" ends the album in Japanese and English simultaneously, the two voices multiplied into a small cathedral of overdubs that grows until it fills whatever room you're listening in.

The three Machiavel tracks — "Chronic Love," "Never-Ending Day," and "Hope to See You Again" — are this album's quiet argument: that a Belgian progressive rock band from the 1970s wrote songs of genuine quality that the world simply never heard, and that it is not too late to hear them now.

Throughout, Gudrun and Rick treat the songs they cover the way a good translator treats a great text: faithful to the meaning, free with the form, and completely unafraid of what the original author might think. They lean on the guitar lines of Gilmour and Blackmore, take Steven Wilson's guitar arrangement for "The Day Before You Came" as a foundation and build something new on top of it, preserve Yuri Naumov's original guitar parts from the 1980s Soviet underground in other recordings, and step into a Freddie Mercury costume without apology — because they genuinely believe that what a great musician once created belongs, in some way, to everyone.

Twins on the Edge of Reason is Shadow & Gudrun at their most adventurous and most themselves: two voices, one universe, no map.