Honoring the moment with Harmony Tividad

“I will always have this feeling that there’s something off about me.” There’s no hint of negativity in Harmony’s facial expression or tone of voice as she shares this thought—just a soft, accepting giggle. “I think if you grow up a weird kid you’re kind of always a weird kid.”

Harmony doesn’t need to tell me that she was and still is a weird kid. I’ve known that since I first heard her fanged, folksy warbling on Girlpool, her old band’s debut EP. The LA duo came to me by way of either my big sister or the network of cool girls who ran the neighborhood of the internet where I spent most of my adolescence. Their sound was kitschy but not cutesy, abrasive but not violent, brash and aspirational but never without its insecurities on display. Girlpool dropped their debut album, Before The World Was Big, right after my junior year was over, and it quickly became my soundtrack to those days caught between a desperation to leave home and high school behind and a fear that I wasn’t appreciating my stifling little world while I had it. In the title track’s music video, Harmony Tividad and her bandmate Avery Tucker ran around on a beach with salt-frizzed hair and toothy smiles, few other features discernible through the pastel overexposure. 

“I learned how to do everything with Avery and through my collaboration with Girlpool,” Harmony tells me. It’s been eleven years since Before The World Was Big came out, and the two members of Girlpool split amicably in 2022—setting off on their respective solo careers. Two years ago, Harmony dropped Gossip, a campy electropop record that flirted with party girl pastiche and techno-absurdism. It was a major pivot from Girlpool’s blushingly earnest twee pop, though the way Harmony describes the shift from working as a band member to a solo artist isn’t as drastic as it sounds on her records: “[Avery and I] had already kind of pivoted away from writing together all the time, which was how we started.”

Pre-Girlpool, Harmony spent her early teens “throwing DIY shows in LA” and discovering new music through sites like HypeMachine. But once music became her career, she voluntarily checked out of the blogosphere for her own sanity. The lack of an internet feedback loop has served both her art and her psyche well since then. “I’m aware of my immediate world, but I don’t pay attention more broadly to how people see me,” she explains. “I’m not the kind of person who is constantly reading into people’s views of me, because if I did I would just get so exhausted and die.”

When it’s pursued excessively, self-awareness can be a dead end. “We’re so limited in what we can understand from where we sit within ourselves,” says Harmony. “I can’t like, slip out and become my mom or become Avery or become you. What I try to do is just live with integrity and hope that it communicates. I think integrity will get you the best possible experience because if you approach things with integrity it encourages other people to as well.” The shift from being one half of an indie darling duo that started when both members were teenagers to solo pop star is a daunting one. It’s Harmony’s “eternal outsider syndrome” that’s served as background noise for all of her artistic pursuits, and has equipped her to take that leap. “I lead with a lot of confidence and a lot of certainty and even when I feel a lot of self-doubt,” she confirms. “I’m really good at subduing the intensity of it, and I think part of how I metabolize that emotion is definitely through music. If you’re able to own your emotions through your work it’s a superpower.”

That superpower is on full display throughout Lifetime, Harmony’s second solo album. She’s found a dream-poppy sweet spot between the flashy hyperreality of Gossip and the intimate, rough-around-the-edges work of Girlpool’s earliest releases. “Gossip was born of a lot of resentment and a lot of pain,” she says. “Lifetime has a lot of pain too, but it’s a different presentation of pain” On Gossip, Harmony channeled her anxieties about unrequited love, body image, and having to accept increasingly dystopian living conditions into detached, bimbofied bangers about partying through the pain, delivering lines like “I’m a bored American / Giving birth to my iPad kids” and “I can be your gay son / I can be your thot daughter / Conservatives will say that there’s something in the water” in an Auto-Tuned, Valley Girl drawl. 

Some of the vocal manipulations remain this time, as do the cheeky jabs at superficiality and unachievable American dreams—though Harmony herself isn’t immune to their pull. She’s still wondering whether she’s “an it girl or a fever dream,” still occasionally entertaining the fantasy of “that Hallmark life / Sixty kids and fixy bike,” but the tone of Lifetime moves away from the ironic detachment of its predecessor, commenting on the neverending nightmare party as an outside observer with hard-mustered sincerity—a “Weekend Girl,” as Harmony calls herself in a twinkly, pitched-up whisper ballad about finding herself alone again after the party’s over. If Gossip was the wild, fuck-it-all-the-world-is-burning-down sleazefest, Lifetime is a morning-after walk on the beach as reality sets in. 

Lifetime is Harmony’s back-to-basics record that’s spiritually, energetically linked to Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and the music video for Jessica Simpson’s “With You.” “This is just very intuitive and natural for me, and it’s coming from that place,” she says. “I love creating things from a theatrical, hyper-explorative, put-on way too, but I think this is me with no mascara on and a tank top in my house. It’s a very transparent kind of thing.” Both Gossip and Lifetime take place in a version of LA dominated by magical-realist melancholia—the trashy, neon nihilism of the former felt like Greg Araki for the brainrot generation, while the latter’s tenderness and oddball Americana recalls the work of Francesca Lia Block. Harmony mentions being inspired by the golden age of Hollywood, particularly Billy Wilder films, and loving “quick-wit dialogue” and “anything with a transatlantic accent.”

Harmony grew up in Hollywood and later, the Valley, and admits that though she loves her home city and what it’s imbued her artistry with, she’s always felt like she wasn’t the right kind of girl for LA. “If I could get a spray tan and hang out at wine bars I would, but I can’t,” she laughs. “My whole life I feel like I’ve been in conflict with the parts of myself that were like, this introverted writer person and also this extroverted, out-and-about person.” Songs on Gossip like “Coke and Mentos,” “Miss America,” and “Technologique” lampooned the spray-tans-and-wine-bars version of LA while reluctantly taking part of it, coming from what Harmony describes as “candy-coated criticism.” I can’t help but bring up Eve Babitz, who Harmony goes on to cite as a sort of retroactive influence: “I read Black Swans and then I read Sex and Rage and it was so eye-opening because I was like ‘This is the world my music lives in.’”

Harmony rides around in a red convertible with an Elvis impersonator in the video for Lifetime’s opener, “Mulholland Drive”—a momentary embrace of its titular Lynchian dreamworld version of LA. From there, the candy coating melts into something resembling an oil spill rainbow in its stunning sonics, lyricism, and visuals. “Best Dressed” is a flower-powered lament about trying to “look pretty while the world breaks your heart;” on “I’m Still Learning How To Leave You,” Harmony ditches the city for Salvation Mountain, where the arid desert and fabricated geographical structure rising from it  give landscape proportions to her drawn-out heartbreak. She sings of “sugar on the mountainside” while golden strings reach for the heavens.

Harmony shares that “I’m Still Learning How To Leave You” was inspired by Stina Nordenstam’s “Everyone Else in the World.” She’d recorded that song as well as the sunny, tongue-in-cheek pop-country ditty “Your Strange Addiction”—Lifetime’s hookiest track—with collaborator Yves Rothman during October 2022, shortly after Girlpool broke up and before she released Gossip. “Then in December of 2024, I was like, ‘We should make an EP of these songs,’ and he’s like okay let’s do it. And I sent him like twenty demos, and he was like, ‘Harmony, we have to make an album.’” The process of turning those demos into Lifetime was pretty intuitive from there.

She likens her writing and recording method to “being your own computer,” taking in data from experiences and influences and generating new ideas from all of it: “Here’s what I’ve taken away from all this living.” It’s part of why—despite calling the internet “so fun” and “a gigglefest”—she tries to stay relatively offline. “So much of what I do is driven by what I experience in real life, and in order to get what I want to write about I have to go outside.” Harmony is, by her own admission, “not a routine person…the only thing I try to do consistently is like, get a tea and go to Pilates.” She shares an anecdote about letting “a mindful amount of dishes” pile up in her sink and only getting around to doing them after coming home at 3 a.m., three drinks in, Dolly Parton tunes blasting. Harmony describes herself as “experience- and urge-driven.” 

“I try to honor the moment,” she says, immediately spinning that philosophy into a tagline for her new album: “Lifetime: Honoring the Moment.”

Lifetime is out June 26 on KRO Records.

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound, and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.

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