What does it sound like to goon? For Australian duo 2charm, there’s a formula. It involves building up and cooling down; edging before letting go; ramping up pressure until a big release. It sounds a lot like trance music, which makes sense: to goon—the act of masturbating alone for hours or days on end—is to search for ultimate euphoria through a mythologized trance-like state. For some, it is a way of life.
This lifestyle is at the center of 2charm’s restless and escapist debut record, star scum city. The project, self-described as “gooner pop,” uses the act as a Trojan horse to blend the solitary and the sultry, as the duo searches for ecstasy through melodic, trance-inspired hyperpop. It’s equal parts ennui and sexual frustration, a record designed to score lonely darkroom excursions in places where you don’t know the language, creating a nine-song Eurotrip of simmering, sweaty passion searching for deliverance.
2charm’s story, as they tell it, starts when they “met on a discord server for big screen gooners.” Their names in kayfabe are “2” and “charm,” and they present themselves as an OnlyFans fantasy, often wearing nothing but sunglasses and gym shorts. In reality, the shirtless twunk heartthrobs are Tim Nelson and Sam Netterfield of the indie-pop group Cub Sport, using this opportunity to shed the trappings of a decade-long career. On star scum city, filtered vocals and booming basslines sing the blues in the pursuit of pleasure. The album’s two centerpieces “you will never be alone in barcelona” and “paris (to get you out my head)” tell the story of a hedonistic vacation meant to dance away the pain. The lyrics speak of homoerotic connection: “Berlin speed at night, dinner with a stranger.”
It’s possible to reach paradise this way, but you can’t escape yourself. An undercurrent of anxiety and repression lies below 2charm’s image of confident masculinity, and that shame is what manages to keep their sometimes standard hyperpop interesting. On album opener “no pressure,” the duo sings with gentle reservation, “Maybe we could fly away/Make another world/No pressure though.” Let’s enter a homosexual dalliance free from the constraints of body and society—no worries if not! “Boyfriend” is the hit, a bright and bouncy confession of a crush, but the pitch-shifted vocals on the post-chorus suggest a scared helplessness. “girls” posits itself as a fascinating look into projected heterosexuality, lauding women—but from a safe distance.
Recent Cub Sport records, including 2023’s Jesus at the Gay Bar, dabbled into soft-spoken dance music. There are traces of that pivot within star scum city, but it’s mostly traded for harder beats and higher BPMs. Half of the album is produced by fellow Aussie Ninajirachi, whose breakneck dance record I Love My Computer spoke similarly to the fragmented nature of romance in a digital age. Her presence is felt in the flittering vocal chops that bookend “chateau,” the chipmunkian breakdown of “girls,” and the general vibe of hypersexual discontent.
The sounds here are largely indebted to the wave of Eurodance that crossed the oceans in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Hints of “9 PM (Till I Come)” by ATB are in the slinky drop of “invisible wings,” and “you will never be alone in barcelona” is as if Robert Miles’ “Children” had a one-night stand with “L’Amour Toujours.” The power of the club classics that 2charm is trying to ape (DJ Sammy’s “Heaven,” Ian Van Dahl’s “Castles in the Sky,” among others) is in the way they contain a wistful yearning beyond the glittering dreamscape. By holding the melancholic and the ecstatic in equal standing, star scum city accomplishes something similar.
The album’s pent-up sexual tension finds release on the closer “arc de triomphe,” a horny whirlwind through Paris and Bangkok. All of star scum city is sexy, but finally, in these last few minutes, it’s able to shed its inhibitions and appreciate the “ripe nectar” of an armpit or a life-changing post-orgasm “heatwave.” In 2charm’s music, sexual transcendence arrives only after contemplative self-loathing. To goon, perchance to dream.
