Premiere: Shook Twins' 'Shake'

• Shook Twins%2C featuring Katelyn and Lauren Shook%2C hail from the Portland%2C Ore.%2C folk scene
• The group will release its third album%2C %27What We Do%2C%27 on April 8
• %27What We Do%27 was produced by Lumineers producer Ryan Hadlock

With Shake, premiering at USA TODAY, Shook Twins present a little apocalyptic post-earthquake folk for your enjoyment.

The group, part of the thriving Portland, Ore., folk scene, will include the track on its third album, What We Do, due April 8 (now available for pre-order at iTunes). Shook Twins consists of identical twins Katelyn and Laurie Shook, bassist Kyle Volkman and multi-instrumentalist Niko Daoussis.

Shake uses language often associated with religious songs about end times, but if there's a god in the song, it's an earth-god exacting seismic retribution.

"Kyle has been reading a lot about the possibility of a giant earthquake hitting the West Coast sometime," Katelyn Shook says. "He would talk about it a lot, and it began influencing me. There's a fear that comes from that story and thinking about it.

"I thought it would be a cool song, but I might as well make it a total fictional story and make up characters living through an earthquake."

While Shake uses elemental language and traditional acoustic instrumentation, Shook Twins doesn't fall into the trap of trying to sound ancient.

"That's kind of our goal, to try to invent something new," Shook says. "We're trying to add elements to our sound that we know are likable, that will go further than being totally weird. But we like to have our own unique flavor."

Those unique qualities become obvious in the group's live performances. "We have so many things we do weird live," Shook says. "Laurie will beatbox, and she does a lot of live looping. When it's just the four of us, she's our alternate drummer — our 'weird kick drum,' we call her — and she does her weird beatbox, so we'll loop that, and she'll pound on her banjo like a drum. She also has a giant golden egg that she's outfitted with a contact mic."

For Shake, Katelyn used a repurposed telephone mic she found on Craigslist for recording some of the track's echoed vocals. "It's an old telephone receiver that's retrofitted," she says. "It has sort of a walkie-talkie sound, but not that dramatic. It's one of my main tricks."

What We Do, the group's fourth album, was recorded with the help of a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign and produced by Lumineers producer Ryan Hadlock.

The group already has attracted several high-profile fans, including author Neil Gaiman, who has said: "I love the harmonies of the Shook Twins, the dreamlike songs that seem somehow permeated by the American Folk tradition, without actually being part of it. They make music that twines through your soul the way vines cover an abandoned shack in the woods."

The group will perform several times during the annual Folk Alliance Conference, which begins today in Kansas City, Mo., hoping to gain bookings to allow the group to expand its touring base beyond the Pacific Northwest and West Coast.