Kevin Bronson on October 4th, 2017

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Twin Temple have turned heads with a brassy sound right out of the darkest corners of the 1950s and the look of mourners in a New Orleans funeral procession. “Satanic doo-wop,” they call it, a sound “reverberating straight out of Phil Spector’s jail cell.” Wink. No matter their get-ups, it’s not hard to fall for the band centered around the husband-and-wife duo of Alexandra and Zachary James — she with her bold, sultry vocals and he with his stinging guitar licks.

“Let’s Hang Together” is exemplary, their latest single released on PLAG Records, the label spun off L.A.’s Play Like a Girl collective. And the band went all in with director Harry Eelman on the video, which follows the outlaw couple through a quite unholy wedding ceremony, a getaway on horseback and, finally, an all-too-literal end.

“‘Let’s Hang Together’ was inspired by our own wedding,” Alexandra James says. “The vows we spoke — ’till till death do us part’ — got us thinking about the dark side of love. We wanted to inject the classic saccharine doo-wop love song with strychnine. Love and death, devotion and insanity, passion and murder — they are all just two sides of the same razor thin dagger.”

She adds that their romance was almost too ill-fated during the making of the video. “In fact, we cheated death a few times. … One of them involved my horse, Poker, who was really wild. It was like playing Russian roulette each time I asked him to do something. By the end of the day, he was stamping and loudly neighing, snorting and rearing up, and even kicked Zachary’s horse. Out of nowhere my horse had finally had enough — he bolted and took off at a violent speed, neighing and kicking his hind legs like a crazy horse, and I went flying off. Thankfully, we died together by way of hanging (as was planned) rather than just me during a riding accident. That would have been tragic.”

||| Watch: The video for “Let’s Hang Together”

||| Live: Twin Temple perform Saturday night at the 79th annual Chinatown Mid-Autumn Moon Festival at Mandarin Plaza in downtown L.A. It’s free and all-ages.

||| Previously: “Girl Trouble”