"Forgiveness" is out now via Anti-Records.
Avery Tucker and Harmony Tividad have been making critically-acclaimed music as Girlpool since they were high schoolers, scurrying around Los Angeles' all-ages concert spaces and skipping class to play gigs with their friends. As their radically minimal first full-length Before The World Was Big was winning them fans far beyond the DIY circles they came from, the duo was testing out life on the east coast, where they continued to translate the bittersweet beauty of late-adolescence into melodic punk and indie-pop. Their next two albums, Powerplant and What Chaos Is Imaginary, are sonic time capsules documenting their development - as songwriters, but also as humans, moving through the world together and separately.
A few years ago, Girlpool returned full-time to their hometown of Los Angeles. Now in their mid-20s, Avery and Harmony are coming to terms with what it means to re-engage with the sprawling sunburnt metropolis of their youth as adults. Unsurprisingly, they've started making songs that feel as complex and mysterious as the experiences that have shaped this tumultuous era of their lives.
Just like they did for What Chaos Is Imaginary, Harmony and Avery each wrote their Forgiveness songs separately, then came together to decide how to present them in a style that felt representative of what excites and inspires them now. These songs investigate the always-shifting boundaries between a number of elementally human concepts: pain and pleasure, sex and love, reality and delusion, insecurity and confidence, grief and growth.
"A lot of my songs on this record are about relationship dynamics where I experienced frustration and pain, and struggling to hold a lot of complexity in my emotions" Avery explains. "Writing Forgiveness helped me fit all those pieces into an acceptance: that my fate pushes me exactly where I need to go." Harmony feels similarly: "A lot of life feels like unavoidable experiences to me," she adds. "To me, Forgiveness is about accepting that concept. It's about forgiving reality for having to be exactly what it is all the time."
The aesthetic and thematic breaking points explored on Forgiveness, a collection of songs written by two distinct artists with their own minds and hearts, could have resulted in an album that felt disjointed or unfocused. In Avery and Harmony's hands, though, these fault lines generate more beauty than tension, as if in Girlpool's world the movement of tectonic plates doesn't spell disaster, but rather marks the beginning of something else, something exquisite and new. In this instance, it's signaling a major step forward for two of this generation's most accomplished chroniclers of life and love at the edge of the world.
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