“Anonymity sometimes feels like a mistake,” said two of dance music’s most doggedly anonymous artists in an unusually heartfelt Instagram post earlier this month. British dance music duo Two Shell were reflecting on their set at Glastonbury’s huge IICON stage, lamenting that people still wonder if it’s actually them up on stage, and then sounding almost defensive: “It was us, and we put our hearts and minds into it.”

This level of sincerity is the antithesis of the group’s trickster approach. Self-destructing interviews; decoys pantomiming DJ sets beamed in from halfway across the world; password-protected tracks on a confusing website—there’s not a smokescreen they haven’t tried. Now, at “the end of a chapter,” they’re ready to be taken seriously. Two Shell have touched on this before: “We’re tired of hiding,” in Mixmag. “Our pranks don’t mean we’re not sincere,” in The Guardian. But even those interviews were silly, just further music-PR 4D chess moves to keep everyone else off their game. This disarming post is different. The jig is up. These are just two ordinary lads who make catchy electronic music, and they want to enjoy their success instead of pretending to be above it. Maybe?

Joke or not, there’s a world-weary tone to their post-Glastonbury missive that also weighs down IIcons like a wet blanket. The album-allergic duo calls the 12-track release a “playlist” of tracks from their sets over the past year. It’s still plenty kooky—the easiest way to describe opener “Can You Hear Me?” is cybernetic bagpipe dubstep, where shrill woodwinds duel with wobbling basslines—but it’s also surprisingly been-there-done-that. Skippy beats, shiny synths, mangled vocals that play tricks on your memory. In the heady days of “home,” a treasure trove of​ new Two Shell tunes would have set the dance music internet alight. IIcons just feels expected, as if their mass appeal and crossover success have driven them closer to the middle of the road. I guess if you play enough big festival stages, you start making music for big festival stages.

The best tracks on IIcons carry the duo’s idiosyncratic genius like a still-burning Olympic torch. “Clutch” is a monster: evil techno-trance-pop that sounds like it’s stomping out of a sewer, all gurgling basslines and huge kick drums. The vocal moves in mysterious ways, bending and resolving at right angles, more ambivalent than anthemic. This has always been their greatest trick: stripping the human voice of its humanity. It’s like they scooped out the breath and left only the disembodied vibrations hanging in the air, the sensation of words and feelings without any meaning.

Ambiguity is Two Shell’s secret weapon, because it makes you go back, over and over, to figure out what the hell they’re actually doing. The rush of “Doom Culture” is brain-scrambling. Shrill synths and curdled basslines hint at aggression, but the rigid kick and strangled vocal sound more like a deeply abstracted ballroom bitch track. “⋆₊˚vision✧‧⁺˖⋆.” is slip-n-slide garage, threatening to careen out of control as every sound is beveled and polished to a skeuomorphic sheen. The staggering “Dark Shadow” sounds both brooding and cartoonish, invoking dubstep’s dentist-drill basslines with equal parts menace and humor, while the vocal captures the icky sensation of accidentally chewing foil. These tracks are uncomfortable and uncanny—never just one thing at any given time—and you can hear in them the excitement that the duo seemed to radiate in every direction when it hit its stride around 2022.

The rest of IIcons is more predictable. The potential hit, “finding my spirit,” tackles a house track head on where Two Shell would usually zig-zag, with a vocal that feels strangely serious. It sounds so much like a Four Tet song that it’s already associated with Four Tet, and it lacks the alien contours we look for in a Two Shell tune. Other tracks, like “eXist” and “Moving Shadow,” are perfectly fine, though they also sound like fairly standard riffs on UK dance music, without the weirdness or ugliness that makes the duo’s best music stick jaggedly in your brain.

Lucky for us, Two Shell remain absolutely sick producers. It often feels like they dreamed up new rare-earth elements and tried to map them in sound—soft, hard, metallic, plasticine, jiggy, all at once—and they’re still pushing the needle leftward. They make underground dance music more pop-friendly, and the pop-friendly side of things more confrontational and silly. But IIcons also shows us that for all their… iconoclasm… Two Shell are heading down a well-trodden path. Their original tactic of taking the piss out of DJ culture doesn’t make as much sense now that they’re as popular and revered as the big-time selectors they once poked fun at. “The intention was never to troll,” they say in that Instagram post. “It was to question what we are and whether it matters.”

It might be a cliché, but what really matters is the music. Even if IIcons is not their best, it’s still far more interesting than most of what gets played on the big stages Two Shell occupy these days. Hopefully the duo can rest up, find some new inspiration, and take off their disguises. Or just get some newer, crazier ones. They could open a restaurant, start a fake nation-state, make dance music for pets. They could also just be Jack and Patrick (or “Pete”), pumping out insidiously hooky dance tracks without hiding behind anything at all, learning from their mistakes and having fun making new ones.