Co-written with Mando Lopez, 'Never Again Will I Be A Twin' appears on the Deluxe Edition ('Édition Extrême De Luxe!') of Low In High School, which was released in the Europe and the United States on December 7, 2018 (a little over a year after the release of the Low In High School studio album, Morrissey's 11th).
The song was recorded at Forum Music Village in Rome around mid-2017 and produced by Joe Chiccarelli. Morrissey's musicians on the song were Jesse Tobias (guitar), Gustavo Manzur (keyboards), Boz Boorer (guitar), Mando Lopez (bass, and father of Max Lopez, who is the child featured on the cover of the Low In High School studio album) and Matthew Ira Walker (drums).
Morrissey has only performed the song 19 times in concert to date.
Listen to 'Never Again Will I Be A Twin' here:
The opening of the song is distantly similar to that of Beck's 'Cellphone's Dead' (released 2006). Listen to Beck's song here:
Musically, the song has a plodding, hard-edged sound that exudes a sense of foreboding. Walker's drumming is both hard and static, reminiscent of the clanging sound on Kraftwerk’s 'Metal on Metal', which was released in 1977 (Listen to 'Metal on Metal' here beginning 0:35:
Whether or not Lopez or any of Morrissey's musicians drew upon either song as inspiration is not known, but it is nonetheless intriguing to note the similarities to 'Never Again Will I Be A Twin'.
Morrissey's vocals are devoid of any charm, warmth, or hope of any kind as he glacially intones lyrics dripping with world-weary cynicism. Starting off with the darkest example of gallows humor ("The operation went well, but the patient died"1), Morrissey derides a litany of commonly held sentiments, including any sense (or hope) of Joie de vivre, declaring that falling in love is "a joke", indicating that being something other than cold blooded (“Let the blood not freeze, what's that supposed to mean?”) is nonsensical, and that humanity is nothing more than a tiresome redundancy (“the human race is obsolete”).
As Morrissey almost invariably does, he wraps his tragic diatribe in a neat bow by informing the listener that outcome is "always the same", thus extinguishing any thought of rescue from what afflicts him. In essence, 'Never Again Will I Be A Twin' reaches the apogee of disillusionment with any notion of interpersonal relationships of any kind.
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