Growing up in Seattle, every show Thomas Dutton went to gave him a sense of prescience. When a band took the stage, it didn’t matter if they were playing to hundreds or dozens of people; they were up there, sharing their intimate lives with the world. As a teen, Dutton knew that he wanted to be up there someday, too, so he studied music with the seriousness required to make it a career. In those formative years, he treated rides from his friends’ older siblings like lessons; every time they slipped a new album into the console, Dutton paid attention. “I’m always trying to capture that feeling I had when I was discovering music that changed my life,” Dutton says. On his sophomore album as Only Twin, It Feels So Nice to Burn, Dutton bottles that sense of nostalgia. “I still feel like that beautiful 16-year-old at his first show in a lot of ways.”

In other ways, he’s not. Dutton’s a dad now; as he shares It Feels So Nice to Burn with the world, his five-month-old is learning how to roll over. The experience of falling in love, getting married, and raising a kid has radically changed his relationship to his music and to himself. It sounds like domestic bliss, but on It Feels So Nice to Burn, Dutton seeks out the moments of tension that give even the most idyllic love stories stakes. The album’s title has a double meaning: on one hand, it’s a nod to “burning everything to the ground and starting over again; on the other, it “feels so nice to burn for someone new.” 

On the single “Give You Up,” Dutton describes the moment he and his wife “jumped in the deep end” of their burgeoning relationship. “I would dance on broken glass,” he sings over glossy, ‘80s-inspired synths reminiscent of a coming-of-age film. “If it meant I got another moment.” That full-throated declaration of love is a far cry from Only Twin’s debut album. On 2021’s Rare Works, Dutton worked through the dissolution of a relationship and the end of a music project that had defined his life for a decade. As one half of the duo Cardiknox, Dutton had been signed to Warner, and before that, he made his entry to the music industry with the Fueled By Ramen project Forgive Durden. 

Now, Dutton is happily independent, and as a solo artist, he’s released some of the most dynamic, genre spanning music of his long career. “I was trying to find a spot that lived between grimy but beautiful sounds paired with more poppy elements,” he says. Inspired by chameleons like the 1975 and Bon Iver, Only Twin emerged out of necessity. When Cardiknox dissolved, producing became Dutton’s full-time job, and he wanted to start a project that showcased himself as a left-of-center, indie-pop aesthete. But as Dutton used music to process his breakup, Only Twin took on a life of its own. “It started as a way to carve out a little space for myself,” he says. “But as I started reclaiming tracks I’d written for other people, the project gave me closure on a huge chapter in my life.” 

It welcomed the start of a new chapter, too. In the midst of releasing Rare Works, Dutton met his wife, and their love affair is memorialized on It Feels So Nice to Burn. On “Born Again,” Dutton describes the sense of renewal he felt when they started dating. “I’m really dying baby/ And I’m ready to be born again, it’s true/ Ready to be born with you,” he sings. But the religious imagery is undercut by Dutton’s refreshing comfort with the macabre: “I know God is counterfeit/ There ain’t nothing after this.” 

“Lyrics are so important to me,” Dutton says. He describes the ones on It Feels So Nice to Burn as diaristic, their specificity giving listeners a chance to really know him. Take “Thirty Minutes,” wherein Dutton recounts a socially distant sushi date: “We’re eating yellowfin/ Debating when the world is gonna end/ She can hurt me now.” That early date evolves into a full-blown love affair, but that nagging anxiety – she can hurt me now – gives the otherwise ebullient synthpop song a memorable edge. 

“Even when I’m writing for other people, I’m tapping into my own experiences,” Dutton says. Such was the case with “Pool Day,” which Dutton originally wrote for the song’s featured vocalist Emilia Ali. It wasn’t the right fit, but it worked perfectly with the narrative of It Feels So Nice to Burn. “That song is about feeling like something is too good to be true, and you don’t want to blow it, but then suddenly you’re blowing it because you’re thinking too much about blowing it,” Dutton explains, laughing. Along with Ali, he invited other collaborators into the studio, including his brother Paul Dutton, as a co-writer. John Paul Roney (Boom Forest) also co-wrote, Noah McGuire played piano on the record, Isaiah Gage and Smith Curry contributed cello and pedal steel, respectively, and Zac Poor co-wrote “Cherry Red.”

Like a slow dance at the end of that coming-of-age film, It Feels So Nice to Burn closes with the clear-eyed “Love of a Lifetime.” Over a consoling guitar part and skittering drumbeat, Dutton’s lucid delivery commands attention. Like all of the songs on It Feels So Nice to Burn, this is a private moment, one you’re welcomed into by a disarmingly earnest Dutton, whose lyrics pay homage to the everyday activities of an ordinary couple. It’s the love they share that’s extraordinary. “When she looks in my eyes/ I can hear the kids in the backyard,” he sings. Small revelations like these abound on It Feels so Nice to Burn, some individual, others eternal. “Your love, it’s on and on – it’s all I’ll ever need.”