Drifting out of the ether on the opening bars of “Pantomimer,” Harmony Tividad’s voice is defiantly submissive. “I don’t know what I want/So I guess I want it all,” she shrugs, her voice a warm, human counterpoint to the drone that sits beneath it. Gradually, the space around her voice is filled with twinkling shoegaze, as though she’s being joined by other players onstage as she sings about not knowing who she is when she isn’t performing for others. Then, there’s an abrupt curtain call; the music falls away, leaving Tividad solo and exposed onstage. The line that opened the track comes back around, this time more forcefully. And that’s where Tividad’s second solo album, Lifetime, ends: a moment of uncomfortable intimacy under a glaring spotlight.
The disquieting effect is reminiscent of the early work of Girlpool, the indie-pop duo Tividad formed as a teenager. On their debut album Before the World Was Big, the two musicians braided their voices together in stark, minimal songs that packed a gut punch. Since the band’s dissolution in 2022, Tividad has flirted with maximalism: She dipped a toe into holographic hyper-pop with the 2023 EP Dystopia Girl, then fully submerged herself in Auto-Tune and latex sheen on her 2025 full-length Gossip, where she indulged an over-the-top brain-rot mindset. Enter Lifetime: Harmony’s second solo LP, a return to indie pop that splits the difference between Girlpool’s bare-it-all catharsis and Gossip’s ironic fever dream.
Lifetime’s dream pop goes heavy on the dreaming. With executive production from Yves Rothman (FKA twigs, Yves Tumor), the record mostly uses a pastel palette—gentle guitars, synths, and vocoder create a sighing, sun-drenched effect—while the lyrics explicitly, obsessively refer to dissociative states. “Stars in my pockets, benzos in my mind,” Tividad sings on the cheerful opening track. “Life is a memory that I’m still living out,” she trills near the top of her register on the eerie lullaby “Where Strangers Go,” before sinking deep into her chest voice, as though duetting with herself. Throughout the album, we seem to only catch surreal glimpses of the narrator’s emotional truth, before it shapeshifts into something else, as though in a dream. On “Mulholland Drive”—its title perhaps a reference to the king of dream sequences himself—Tividad’s stark descriptions of the mental imprisonment of a toxic relationship are juxtaposed with bright, ebullient guitar strums and discombobulating lyrical heel turns like, “He’s an edgelord and I’m pro-ana.”
Often, the production flourishes lean on nostalgia to exaggerate this sense of not-quite-there-ness: The sighs of electric guitar on the title track and the cassette demo-style spaciousness of “In the Light of the Sun” create the sense that these songs could be soundtracking a coming-of-age indie movie from the 1990s. Elsewhere, there are traces of Tividad’s foray into hyperpop, delivered with a feather-light touch. On “Apple Pie,” Tividad takes on the digital sheen of a vocoder as she skewers an ex for not being able to handle a partner with autonomy. This is just one of many points on the album where she bristles with anger—at lovers, at society, at herself—and yet drowns the feeling in soft reverb and melodies that mimic the endless California sunlight.
At points, the album can feel so sedated that there’s little to grasp onto—as with the pretty but somewhat formless “Quiet Cost of Living,” or the brittle ballad “Weekend Girl.” But when Tividad pierces through the haze, it’s arresting. Take “I’m Still Learning How to Leave You,” a string-assisted almost-break-up song where she fights with her own complicity in a never-ending relationship cycle in a raw and rousing voice. Or the self-abandonment anthem “Anything,” where the rising note of desperation in her vocal mimics the cloying lyrics. While these moments are moving, they can also make Lifetime a tough hang. Many of the songs continually circle the same themes: performativity, toxic relationships, struggling for selfhood and agency—though this repetitiveness does mimic the logic of anxious, self-deprecating thoughts.
Still, Lifetime’s self-conscious dance between performativity and vulnerability is occasionally dazzling. The slickest example is “Best Dressed,” a ’60s-indebted shuffle buttressed by sublime backing vocals, where Tividad’s voice comes apart at the seams as she belts, “She looks pretty while the world breaks her heart.” The song presents an “it girl” letting us into the self-hating spiral of her inner monologue while also holding us at arm’s length. Existential turmoil bleeds out of every line, even as our narrator keeps smiling winningly and winking straight down the camera lens. Her pain is all part of the show.
