The tiniest notes, the biggest sentiments: Girlpool make songs that feel audaciously small, like an eyedropper pointed toward the heavens. The 10 songs on Before the World Was Big not only employ a bare minimum of chords (two, pretty much always) but a minimum of notes. If you’d never held a guitar, or even seen one, you could be gently coached to play "Ideal World", the album’s opening track, within three minutes of being handed one. The same is true of many others.
And yet, Before the World Was Big brims with a mysterious power, a charged and palpable sense of hope and awe. Focusing on the clean bones of the songs only leads you to be astonished by how full they feel. This is music with no corners, no hidden places in the arrangements, and the emotions emerge with gratifying clarity. Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker—who sing occasionally in harmony and occasionally in unison, but always together—seem to be singing in the center of an empty, well-lit room, staring directly at you. To listen to Before the World Was Big is to meet their gaze and feel slightly unnerved and exhilarated. It is a quiet album of uncommon intensity.
Tividad and Tucker formed Girlpool when they were 17 and 18, and they told anyone who asked them at the time that they were drawn to each other for their shared sense of purpose: "We wanted something that was honest and straightforward," Tucker said. "We both wanted to be super vulnerable…Because of the stripped down nature of our music, if one of us messes up, it’s incredibly noticeable. We’re not trying to hide." In part, it is this clarity of purpose that resounds from the empty spaces on their debut LP. Their EP was shouted, and in its hardy squall, you could hear two powerful voices honing in on some way they might make a dent in the universe. Sometimes, it felt like watching a kid run into a wall.
They sound calmer and infinitely more assured here. The final song’s title, "I Like That You Can See It", stands as a simple manifesto. The song is about harnessing nerves and vulnerability as sources of power, and it repeats the striking image: "Is it pouring out my body? My nervous aching?/ I like that you can see it." The arrangement performs the same act. There are two chords, played with two fingers, and yet the song feels bigger every time you listen to it.
Somewhere between their formation and now, Tividad and Tucker have divined the starry-eyed power of the purest indie-pop. It is a romanticism that thrives on potential energy, on the contemplation of things that haven't quite happened. Romanticism occurs in the distance between what might happen and what does, and listening to Before the World Was Big feels like walking through this exalted liminal space. "I feel safest in knowing that I am true/ When I look in your eyes, the idea of you," they sing with clarion force on "Ideal World". "I just miss how it felt standing next to you/ Wearing matching dresses before the world was big," they chant on the title track, a line that doubles into a round-robin singalong.
Tividad and Tucker’s voices are foregrounded, always. They sing about real-life friends, by their first names. They reference each other by first name in their lyrics. "I am still looking for sureness in the way I say my name," they sing on "Chinatown". Their twinned vocals gives the album a powerful and traceable through line—these are songs about two specific friends who have realized that the world is a less frightening place, that you feel surer and safer in it, with someone else by you.
