Dr. Seuss is trashed at the club—can you pleaaasze give him his phone back? He swears he won’t send that horny text he’s been drafting: “I want you inside my house/And I want you inside my blouse.”
Wait—that’s a lyric from Harmony’s new album Gossip, a 33-minute migraine that boasts such rhymes as, “Wake up and I’m sad/Out late acting bad” and, “You might think I’m a thot/You’re right, I’ve been thinking a lot.” Harmony Tividad, a songwriter who once penned simple, aching music as half of indie-pop duo Girlpool, is now a pop performance artist in the guise of a disaffected party girl. She seeks partly to indict superficiality, and partly to indulge it. The performance could have been interesting—too bad there’s not more art involved.
Gossip is Tividad’s first full-length release since parting ways with Girlpool collaborator Avery Tucker in 2022. It follows her 2023 EP Dystopia Girl, where the eclectic electronic palette was alternately dreamy and dancey. As Harmony sang about “angel kisses” through iridescent, Imogen Heap-inspired vocoder, you could imagine taking some pills and spacing out to the Beziers screensaver. But the bassy, bratty “Shoplifting From Nike” offered a better taste of what was to come: “I get so insufferable,” Harmony sang over sawtooth bass, “It makes me whole.”
Gossip is, in many respects, insufferable. The thumping beats, noise sweeps, and Auto-Tuned vocals take cues from Kesha and 3OH!3, embracing a trashy throwback sound that musicians like Miss Madeline have brought to the 2020s. In doses, this can be fun and sexy. On Gossip, it’s relentless. Over punishingly noisy beats, Harmony sketches a scorched earth shaped like Los Angeles, peering down with bleary-eyed omniscience at “kleptos” and girls “looking for a bootleg lobotomy.” The world-building works when she leans into hyperbole (“You’re crying about how your mom just died from lipo,” she taunts on “Rockstar”). But these songs aren’t all that absurd—instead they feel trapped inside vapid reality, referencing “my iPad kid” and the Catholicism trend.
If you’re bored already, Harmony is way ahead of you. Over the course of the record, she describes herself as “a bored American,” “a bored prima donna,” “bored just thinking about talking to you,” and “so nullified, can’t even hear you snoring.” Like the protagonist of “Stereo,” Harmony is also “smarter than she seems”; if Gossip is banal, it’s performatively so, a choice Harmony lets us in on with a particularly memorable line from airhead fembot anthem “Technologique”: “Some would say I’m numb as fuck/But I’m totally fun/Please can you explain to me geopolitics?”
If the point is to prove she’s too smart for this music, why make it? Enter the indie sleaze revival, which has returned semi-serious dance-pop to the zeitgeist. After eight years immersed in the “catharsis-oriented” world of Girlpool, Harmony appears to regard Gossip as something of an ironic breather. By her account, the character she’s playing now represents the futility of goodness in a fallen world: Upon releasing “Shoplifting From Nike,” she described her approach as “trying to function under the weight of all things and creating a personality that is so shameless that you believe you can survive it.” Rejoice! Our times are intolerable—can’t Harmony be, too?
“Annoying” isn’t the worst quality for pop, and several songs on Gossip really do have earworm potential (“Coke and Mentos” and “Technologique” especially). But the stultification leaves little room for artistry. Internet brain-rot need not inspire vacuous art—take, for example, Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, a surprisingly moving novel about a woman who becomes famous for tweeting “Can a dog be twins?” Harmony, a gifted observer of intimate feeling, is capable of seeing through the wide and luminous eyes of a poet. The one-note Gossip isn’t attempting poetry: It’s DJing a party that no one, including her, really wants to attend. Can’t we all just go home?
