After Girlpool’s dissolution in 2022, co-founder Harmony Tividad shifted gears. Her 2023 EP Dystopia Girl introduced a new dimension to her artistic identity, accenting her signature delicate, aching lyrics with a dancefloor edge. A year later, her solo debut Gossip doubled down on those club-forward impulses to mixed results. The album was an intriguing and occasionally fun, yet ultimately numbing, experiment—a pastiche-y conjuring of the bratty, trashy sounds of 2010s EDM with a 2020s disaffected party-girl attitude. Though it did offer a glimpse inside the goofier, more extroverted part of Tividad’s personality, it seemed more like something she needed to get out of her system than a fully formed effort. I don’t blame her for wanting to pivot in a radically different direction, especially after working in a relatively consistent thematic and tonal wavelength with former bandmate Avery Tucker for almost a decade. Still, her first big solo outing couldn’t help but feel like an underwhelming creative endeavor, particularly given her and Tucker’s gift for piercingly intimate songwriting and deftly arranged melodies.
Thankfully, Tividad’s warm and focused follow-up, Lifetime, provides a more mature and promising peek into the kind of artist she can be on her own, skewing closer to the Californian dreaminess of Dystopia Girl and Girlpool’s early work than the lobotomized unseriousness of Gossip. Where Tucker burrowed himself deeper into the gruffer, earthier part of their band’s sonic terrain on last year’s Paw, Tividad taps into the lighter, brighter surfaces of the duo’s output on Lifetime—an album whose picturesque and introspective qualities evoke the haunted Americana of David Lynch mixed with the angsty, horny neon-pop art of Gregg Araki and the ethereal nature of Sofia Coppola’s oeuvre.
Similar to Gossip, Tividad is interested in crafting her own personal, postmodern spin on vintage cultural and aesthetic signifiers. In this case, however, she and collaborator Yves Rothman engage with those ideas more sincerely than ironically, which greatly benefits Lifetime. The album’s cinematic allusions are given an especially unique and fresh twist on the rock-solid opener “Mulholland Drive,” which houses the bitter emotions from that iconic film’s tortured romance inside a summery folk-pop instrumental: “Makes me wonder why / I can’t get you off my mind / ‘Cause I want the high / Of a picture perfect lie.” The song itself might not be something you’d hear in Lynch’s film, but Tividad both captures and identifies with Naomi Watts’ character’s primal need to indulge in fantasy in order to temper the pain that lingers from her unmet desires.
Tividad continues to channel her desire for freedom from her personal afflictions through tender, blissed-out production on the following track “Best Dressed,” which feels like classic Girlpool with its gentle, sun-dappled guitar riffs. You almost half-expect Tucker to show up with a gritty backing vocal to balance out Tividad’s coo, yet Tividad remarkably makes it her own, succinctly and incisively addressing our culture’s narrow-minded fixation with body image and the performance of femininity by poignantly lensing it through her own experiences (“All the men who wanted me / Never wanted all of me”).
According to the press notes, the record was written over several years, from well before Girlpool’s breakup in 2022 to Lifetime’s production, and you could feel Tividad grappling with her personal history amid her present anxieties throughout. The title track, in particular, paints a vivid, intimately detailed picture of Tividad’s uncertainty about her future as she grows up, remarking on the emptiness of living the “Hallmark” and “Walmart” life as the good times pass by in the blink of an eye. Looking at her past through a more nuanced, wistful lens also extends to her angst about relationships. The downbeat, country-tinged anthem “I’m Still Learning to Leave You” finds her navigating the aftermath of a breakup with her head held high, while the easy, breezy “Your Strange Addiction,” a brief but major album highlight, affectionately and sarcastically soundtracks Tividad’s letting go of a toxic hookup buddy, making even the more tonally jarring lyrics (“Forever sexual tension”) feel palatable.
As with Tucker’s Paw, Lifetime occasionally suffers from a lack of sonic variation, sometimes making its songs blur together, but a memory-tapestry structure tends to have that effect, with ideas, words, and visuals all blending into one continuous, malleable flow. Luckily, Tividad applies some unexpected yet earned and effective touches of pop and irreverent iconography to her songs, making them stand out a little more. On “Apple Pie,” she sings in Auto-Tune while summoning lurid images of feet-kissing. On “Weekend Girl,” Tividad’s vocals are pitch-shifted to an almost angelic, hyperpop register, a compelling contrast to the more grounded, hushed instrumentation. The spare keyboard and bass on the penultimate track, “Where Strangers Go,” also act as a magnetic sounding board for Tividad’s existential melancholy and romantic yearning.
Although dance-pop could still be in Tividad’s future, the sparkling folk-country of Lifetime suggests itself to be a much stronger, more emotionally suitable template for the singer-songwriter’s cleverness and vulnerability. The glitz, glamor, and grime that defined her last album are still technically here, but in smaller, more accessible doses, adding a subtle yet noticeable verve to Tividad’s raw honesty. For an album that explores the difficult transitions she navigates, her ability to dig deep and gracefully embrace what she finds feels satisfyingly apt. [KRO]
Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress, and Metacritic. You can find him on X @samiamrosenberg.
