With their jaw-dropping, 2015 self-titled debut, Ibeyi introduced to the world a somber and sobering approach to soulful alt-pop that incorporates multicultural melodies, memoirist hooks, and minimal (but unbelievably catchy) instrumentation. And it’s even more chills-inducing live.

French and Afro-Cuban wunderkinds Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz of Ibeyi (“twins” in their Yoruba mother tongue) have joined the ranks of musical twin VIPs, alongside incumbents like Kelley and Kim Deal (The Breeders), Aaron and Bryce Dessner (The National), Simone and Amedeo Pace (Blonde Redhead), and Tegan and Sara Quin.

Needless to say, twin-ship (musical and familial) is part of Ibeyi’s identity. Lisa-Kaindé spoke to this sentiment last night—at their packed-to-the-brim Neptune show—when she started gushing over Díaz’s qualities of beat-keeping, twerking, and how she covets her sister’s infectious laugh.

Ibeyi’s twin VIP status might have been issued when they were both fashionably featured in multiple scenes of Lemonade. However, the duo definitely didn’t (and still don’t) need Beyoncé cred to validate their virtuosity. The twins weren’t afraid to stoke the demographically mixed crowd by strutting their sweetness and charisma on stage, but they also weren’t shy about getting to the real-talk, real fast.

“I Carried This for Years,” the opener for their 2017 sophomore album Ash, was also the first song they played last night. It’s a dark and stormy five-word mantra (say it to yourself over and over and let it sink in), and it’s enough to make anyone halt and holistically ‘get real’, especially when it’s spine-chillingly serenaded to you with the vibrato, venerability, and vigor of their Venusian voices.

The quick, one-and-a-half-minute song is a perfect survey course for the complexity of Ibeyi’s sound. It samples musicians like Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares (The Mystery of Bulgarian Voices) with expressive empiricism, shines with clear acapella to show off their minor-scaled timbre and harmonies, and is loaded with bass drops, electro drum-pads, cajón and batå percussions, and West African rhythms.

One of the stories Lisa-Kaindé told between sets was when, as a six-year-old, she told her grandmother that she wanted to be president, and her grandmother simply said: “You’ve got my vote.” No hesitations, no qualifying challenges about how there haven’t been any women-of-color presidents, just a reassuring “You’ve got my vote.”

The story was Lisa-Kaindé’s sly answer to the President’s “grab ‘em by the pussy” gestures. Her response, she said, will always confidently be “no man is big enough for my arms”—a brilliant segue into the track of the same title. It was a diatribe about the power of believing in yourself and not letting the Trumps of your life dictate your success. Touché.

Throughout the night, it was this heartfelt storytelling, along with their TLC via crowd work, lighting, and sliding-puzzle-album-cover props, that all added to the heightening charm—not to mention the anticipation they built around when they were finally going to play their crowd-pleaser “The River” (go watch the music video now if you haven’t). Of course, they made us wait until the last encore song!

Pop music, more than most genres, exists as a kind of cultural common denominator, but it can be more than that when preached from the right mouth. If we turn in the ‘Scriptures of Ibeyi’ to the lyrics for their song “Away Away,” it reads, “I don’t give up, baby / I feel the pain, feel the pain / But I’m alive, I’m alive.”

Maybe that’s a better mantra to let sink in.