Before Charley Crockett nixed a husband-and-wife duo from his tour last week over their use of “Satanic imagery,” it’s likely that few had ever heard the name Twin Temple. A cult band (perhaps literally) out of L.A., the group have released throwback rock and doo-wop songs with titles like “Lucifer, My Love” and “Satan’s a Woman.” Apparently that was too much for Crockett and, well, all hell broke loose online: Twin Temple announced they’d been removed from the shows, Crockett defended his decision, and then Jack White got involved, offering Twin Temple an opening slot at one of his upcoming gigs.
Today, vocalist Alexandra James and guitarist Zachary James announced their new album, Doomed Lovers, a project that puts Twin Temple squarely in the throwback country music lane. Think less outlaw country and more Patsy Cline. Arriving Oct. 9, Doomed Lovers was produced by Shooter Jennings — who also produced Crockett’s latest albums.
With all this twisted black magic to parse, we Zoomed with Twin Temple, who’ll tour with Danzig later this summer, to talk about the Crockett dustup, whether they’ll accept White’s offer, and whether they really do worship Satan.
How did you learn that you were no longer going to be opening for Charley Crockett?
Alexandra James: Our former agent got a call from Charley’s agent, and he just said, “Charley made the decision to remove you due to satanic imagery.” We just recently started working with a new agent, and we asked them to call Charley’s agent again to confirm, and that’s what they said.
Did someone complain? A venue? Promoter? Or was it Charley’s call?
AJ: The only thing we know is that it was due to satanic imagery. We actually got a note from one of the venue promoters that was just like, “I’m so sorry about this. We were looking forward to working together.” At least for them, it wasn’t coming from the venue side. Our agent said it came down from Charley.
In your Instagram post telling fans you were off the tour, you mentioned artistic freedom. Do you think that your artistic freedom is under assault?
Zachary James: These are Charley’s shows. Ultimately, it’s his decision, which, you know, is artistic freedom in its own right.
AJ: Artistic freedom isn’t guaranteed, so that’s something that we don’t take for granted. But I felt like it would have been a really cool statement on Charley’s part about music being able to bring people from different backgrounds together. I feel like music is maybe the hands-down most beautiful and powerful art form to bring people together. The reason why we were so excited about these shows was to build some of these bridges. Charley is a really talented artist, and I think we share so much musical DNA: our love of everything from Roy Orbison to Buddy Holly, Waylon Jennings, Loretta Lynn, Burrito Brothers, the blues. So, we’re a little sad. It felt like maybe it’s reinforcing a divide between artists.
Satanic imagery has been used in music forever. Everyone from Black Sabbath to Mötley Crüe, to the Misfits and Glenn Danzig. Even Sammy Davis Jr. got involved in the Church of Satan. Alexandra and Zachary, are you guys really Satanists?
AJ: Hell yeah! To us, Satan is a metaphor for exploring all of these things in our art. It’s the images that have always resonated with us. For me, growing up a mixed-race woman [of Korean and British descent], first generation in America, I’ve always felt a little bit like an outsider. And Satan’s the original outlaw, right? He’s a rebel angel. He’s the one who questioned authority, fought for himself, refused to bow down or conform, and was like non serviam. That was a metaphor that resonated very strongly with me.
I grew up reading gothic romance. Frankenstein really resonated with me because I didn’t see anyone representing me on stages or in film. It was the monsters that, I felt, were like I was. There were times growing up where we had the mob with the pitchforks coming out for me as a mixed-race kid. I got my first death threat when I was six. And so very early on, I learned, “I am never going to be really accepted by mainstream America. There isn’t a Barbie that looks like me.”
And that’s what we mean by artistic freedom: the freedom to explore the things that inspire and excite you, and for us, that’s our visual language. Freedom is what this country was built on — and we have an amazing constitution that protects these rights.
ZJ: America is kind of satanic at its core.
Is there a particular sect of Satanism you ascribe to? Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, for instance?
AJ: I think the thing that resonates with us with Satanism, or the broader tradition of the “left-hand path,” as you would call it, is that it is not dogmatic. So, there’s no proselytizing. There’s no, “This is the correct way to practice.” It’s very much about finding what works for you.
ZJ: It’s exploring subversive ideas, transcending cultural norms. Individualism.
AJ: But I do practice witchcraft. Zach does practice ceremonial magic. We are students of the occult and find the tradition very interesting, ideologically and philosophically. It’s all those things, and that’s really why we made Twin Temple in the first place. It’s really fun to go shopping for a human skull and a Ronettes record in the same day, and we get to do that with our band.
Shooter Jennings produced Doomed Lovers and the last few Charley records. Do you know how he’s balancing this drama with Charley?
AJ: He’s been supporting us and Charley through this, and I think that speaks a lot to his character of who he is as a human.
To be clear, you aren’t feuding with Charley Crockett?
ZJ: Not at all.
AJ: We still like his records, and we still respect what he’s doing for American music.
ZJ: We just had to make a comment because we had to notify fans. I mean, if it wasn’t that, we wouldn’t even have made a public statement.
Jack White has offered to have you open one of his L.A. shows in September. Where does that stand?
AJ: OK… We already have committed to this tour with Glenn [Danzig], and we do have a show in Anaheim with him on Sept. 26 with a radius clause. So, it’s really up to our Lord and Savior Glenn and his camp and the promoters how they want to do that. We obviously want to do it, but…
Even Satanists have to adhere to a radius clause.
AJ: I’ve been a White Stripes fan since I was a kid. “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” was the first song I learned on guitar. But we do have this date and we have to honor our commitment there. So, we’re trying to work it out.
Well, we’ll offer up a prayer to the dark angel that it all works out.
AJ: Be careful now! Are you going to put that in print?
A past show produced by The Concert Production for Sidhu Moose Wala.
The Concert Production founders Sohail Mansuri and Zeeshan Siddiqui. Photos: Courtesy of The Concert Production
Linda Ramone and John Travolta Sean Sabhasaigh/Getty Images
Drake onstage in Toronto last year
Everybody Likes Drake Again. That Means We’re Healing
Not to be dramatic or anything, but not too long ago, listening to people talk about Drake, you’d think he would never top the charts again. But here we are: With Iceman, he’s broken his own record, earning a 13th week atop Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart on Sept. 5, surpassing Take Care’s 12-week run more than a decade ago. The achievement comes after the great rap civil war of 2024, which was framed as everything from a referendum on Drake’s character as a human being to a cleansing of what popular radio host Ebro would describe, in February 2025, as “a sickness in the game.”
Again, not trying to be dramatic, but even if you were skeptical of the discourse circa 2024, it is a bit shocking to hear the public’s recent re-embrace of Drake. Consider how far the frenzy around the most salacious allegations on Kendrick Lamar‘s “Not Like Us” extended. There was Christopher Alvarez, a disabled journalist, being dragged into conspiracy theories. There was the woman from the resurfaced concert footage, now 31, having to publicly dispute the creepy significance strangers had assigned to an onstage kiss from when she was 17. Drake said in his lawsuit against UMG that the threats had forced him to pull his seven-year-old son out of school.
What now feels like the absurdity of the moment registered as something deathly serious at the time. By September 2024, Lamar was releasing the ominous “Watch the Party Die,” just days after his Super Bowl halftime performance was announced. Oh, also, a major talking point in American culture a year and a half ago was whether one of the biggest superstars in the world would be publicly branded a pedophile during the Super Bowl.
In what world would any celebrity recover from that?
Except, with time, the online frenzy surrounding the Drake and Lamar feud reads more like a mass-psychosis event than a cultural reckoning. The music, oddly enough, often seemed secondary to the certainty of everyone discussing it. “Not Like Us” was a veritable hit, absolutely. But its cultural dominance became bound up in a widespread vilification of Drake that curdled online, where the most damning interpretation of anything could quickly become the accepted one. For a while, even putting on a Drake song could feel like something you had to explain, as if listening amounted to taking a position on the allegations.
That this all happened in 2024 is meaningful. This was right in the peak of Elon Musk’s reconstruction of Twitter, privileging rage bait and engagement tactics that helped misinformation disseminate like fact. It was also the beginning of AI tools becoming sophisticated enough to produce convincing-sounding tracks. Even before Drake released his first response, “Push Ups,” AI-generated response tracks were circulating across social media. And so, in many ways, the well of public opinion was already poisoned.
Listeners’ recent embrace of Drake feels settled in a broader cultural shift brewing since 2024. The beef, in hindsight, feels like a dying vestige of whatever people want to call “Woke 1.0”: a particular faith that exposing the right person could amount to a cultural transformation. For a moment, defeating Drake seemed to promise something about the future of hip-hop, about who would belong in it and what it would tolerate.
There were obvious holes in the argument, namely who exactly these arbiters of culture were and why they were uniquely qualified to speak for the entirety of Black people, questions that Drake pokes at on “Ran to Atlanta” from Iceman. Still, these were never even supposed to be binding philosophical truths in the first place. To hear levelheaded commentators discuss it, this was all simply entertainment — two of the genre’s greats duking it out. Even one of the beef’s catalysts, Metro Boomin, echoed the sentiment, lamenting how online fans had turned the battle into something sinister. Hell, even Jay-Z said something similar before himself tossing a few jabs at Drizzy in a freestyle at the Roots Picnic this year. But the artists themselves supplied the allegations. The ability to raise those stakes and then retreat into “simply entertainment” was part of the dynamic, too.
Even so, how it all devolved into a pseudocultural reckoning says more about the environment fans exist in today than it does about either Drake or Lamar. In the years around the beef, shocking revelations about Diddy as well as the global elite’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein have become folded into the background, alongside a sense that accountability remains selective. This atmosphere of collective powerlessness offers one explanation for the conspiratorial thinking at the heart of Lamar versus Drake. A frustration with an increasingly degraded world and dwindling resources to change it means outrage can mobilize an enormous number of people very quickly, with little holding them together once the moment passes.
The language of exploitation and cultural extraction gave the battle a purpose that seemed to extend well beyond either rapper. But even if you took the least charitable opinion imaginable of our Canadian hitmaker, what was supposed to happen after Drake was defeated? The industry whose supposed wickedness Drake allegedly embodied carried on selling the spectacle itself.
What everyone was caught up in was an appetite with a longer history than the social media platforms now feeding it. Lance Oppenheim’s new film, Primetime, returns to Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator, a television format that made public humiliation feel like a public service. The connection is in the experience offered to the audience. The viewer could enjoy the confrontation with the reassuring sense that watching served some larger good. Never mind if anything that was unfolding on screen amounted to justice.
In the historian Anton Jäger’s book-length essay Hyperpolitics, published earlier this year in English, he describes how the past decade’s surge of political feeling has coincided with a continuing withdrawal from communal life. More isolated digital environments can fuel extraordinary mobilization without the actual community organizations that might turn it into something tangible. Negating Drake, then, became a gesture in itself. A means of signaling a broader dissatisfaction with the direction of hip-hop culture. Where the problems extend to technology and the demoralizing margins of streaming music, for a while it felt good for people to just wrap it all up in one word: Drake.
But on Iceman, it’s hard to take the idea of Drake as an evil force within hip-hop very seriously, even as he himself makes an effort to lean into the role of the villain. Drake’s music is most potent when it’s aimed at the masses, even if he swears his nice-guy days are over. This is the Degrassi kid turned global superstar rivaling Taylor Swift, after all.
Now, with Fear of Missing Out, Drake’s cryptically announced project slated for release this week, we’ve entered a second kind of Drake Renaissance. However delusional it seems, there was a moment when it felt somehow wrong to play Drake. His return to the top of the charts suggests a good deal of people were eager to get back to listening.