Though Gmail has already relegated Sex Week to users’ spam folders, the duo’s name would look especially gnarly in a brutalist font on a T-shirt. If you were one of the lucky writers or editors whose inboxes didn’t filter Pearl Amanda Dickson and Richard Orofino’s music into the shadow realm of neglected press emails, then you’re likely already hip to their sound and, just maybe, its hook has already pricked right through your cheek. I have been raving about Dickson and Orofino’s upcoming eponymous EP. A friend recently asked me what the energy of Sex Week’s music is, and I replied that it’s like “Alex G if he loved Cronenberg movies and was a woman.” A good word to describe their sound would be “ooze” or “sicko.”
Dickson and Orofino on paper are a unique pairing—an actress and a longtime Bandcamp savant—and when you spend even just a handful of moments with them, it’s clear that there is a cord knotted between their hearts, even if they’ve only been making music together since February 2023. They sit together on Zoom, Dickson with her green Billie Eilish hair and Orofino with buggy eye-glasses, and look at each other when answering questions. There’s a closeness present, and it radiates off the screen like some great reward for two people who very intensely found each other. Sex Week isn’t out yet, but Sex Week has already arrived sounding like a forever.
Orofino lives in Brooklyn but grew up in Long Island, while Dickson originally called Atlanta home before moving northeast herself. Since 2015, Orofino has been uploading music online, beginning with an EP called Gardenia. Dickson, an actress who’s done brief stints on Yellowjackets and The Girl from Plainville, cites his 2022 song “Johnnycakes” as being cinematic and formative for her. “It was one of the first songs that I really listened to by you,” she says to Orofino. “It’s so romantic and sweet and sad and giant. It took me to a place that I have been for, which I think is what you hope for in music.” After getting to know each other, Orofino sent Dickson all of his unreleased music, which he turned into local files and uploaded to her Spotify account. “I had a whole playlist of Richard’s unreleased songs and I would just listen to them all the time,” she continues. “His music was hitting a point for me that felt very obsessive.” Dickson turns to Orofino: “I think you were in my Top Artists last year, too.” “So cool,” he replies.
You can learn a lot about a person by not just the songs they listen to, but by the songs that they recommend to others. Sex Week’s origins can be traced back to a playlist called “colorado 2 omaha,” which Dickson made for her friend Allison, who also happened to be Orofino’s then-roommate. The mix was intended for Allison’s upcoming cross-country drive, but it made its way into her and Orofino’s apartment afterwards. “She would play it all the time,” he says, “and I’d always be like, ‘What song is this?’ Allison would always be like, ‘Oh, it’s this song from the playlist that my friend Pearl made.’”
“colorado 2 omaha” is 80 songs long and covers everything from Orange Juice and Without a Sound-era Dinosaur Jr. to Sidney Gish and Whip-Smart-era Liz Phair—a blend that Orofino found especially exciting. “As I was listening I was like, ‘Who is this?’ Those songs are so, so interesting and so cool and so good,” he says. “A lot of them, I didn’t know. I remember being like, ‘How do I not know this song? This should be my favorite song!’ over and over again. I knew of Liz Phair but now, I’m obsessed.” As is the case in the always-modern “small world” of it all, Dickson and Orofino found out, when Dickson was visiting New York from Atlanta, that they’d been fans of each other long before actually meeting IRL. “We had a moment of being like, ‘Hey, I really like your music,’” Dickson mentions. “And I’m like, ‘Hey, I really like that playlist. I listen to it all the time,’” Orofino replies.
The first-ever Sex Week song, “Toad Mode,” came out last fall and is the first song Dickson and Orofino completed together. “I had played Richard a few demos of me poorly playing guitar and singing,” Dickson says, and Orofino says “So good” in a whisper next to her. “We worked on those songs together, but then ‘Toad Mode’ was like—” “What if we do a duet?” Orofino chimes in. “It was us going back and forth, coming up with the song on the spot.” You might not hear “Clamoring for cuddles / He’s making me see doubles / Stepping in my puddles” and think of Johnny and June Carter Cash, but Dickson finds a lot of inspiration in country duets that feel as natural as they do timeless. The stems of Sex Week’s always-shape-shifting oeuvre grow from the roots of everyone from Cat Power to Haruomi Hosono and the Grease soundtrack. Eclectic is a massive understatement; it’s why they wound up on a label like Grand Jury.
A lot of the Sex Week EP was put together in chunks, with songs coming together whenever Dickson and Orofino could spend time together. “Cockpit” was written when Orofino visited Atlanta, as Dickson laid on the floor and sang lines like “soaking up your smell, what if we meld into one single cell” and “rot, rot, rot, rot slipped inside of me” into a Snowball Blue podcast microphone hooked up to Orofino’s laptop. After “Cockpit,” the duo opted to “live with it” for a little while. They had no release plans but had considered maybe putting out later down the line. They wrote “Naked” together over FaceTime and then, in May, Dickson migrated to New York permanently. “That’s when it all became a little more like, ‘Okay, let’s really make these songs,’” she says. “Totally,” Orofino adds. “‘We have this home studio in my apartment, let’s just make some tunes in my bedroom.’ It was so much easier than doing it from afar.”
While Orofino has been releasing music under his own name for 10 years, Dickson is still-green about this whole music-making operation and was guided into it with patience from her bandmate. “It really felt like being nurtured and guided,” she says, “because I’ve always loved music and had my own little private singing and playing guitars when I’m feeling particularly emotional. I think what I was really looking for was a hand to hold about it, because it felt so vulnerable and intense.” Dickson is honest about her habits, that if she doesn’t know how to do something then she is oft-compelled to abandon it. “I think there’s so many moments where you’d be like, ‘It’s okay, let’s give it some space but then come back to it,’” she says, gesturing toward Orofino. “I think that was really beneficial, especially because I loved doing it. It was just a hurdle for my ego to not know how to do something.”
That’s how “Kid Muscle” came about—Orofino had a loop set up for the song and Dickson had lyrics and a melody ready for it, but couldn’t get them out. “I got so frustrated and then, after cooling down, I got into this little closet and put a blanket over my head and just went for it in one take, just really singing it,” she continues. “I was like, ‘Okay, that was it.’ That was a really big hurdle for me, initially. Richard always was sitting there with me through it, and I think some people would have just been like, ‘That girl is crazy.’” “No way!” Orofino immediately responds. “I understand frustration in any kind of creative capacity. There are things that I don’t know how to do. If I’m hearing a song that I like, I’m like, ‘How did they get that sound on this? I just can’t get it. Something doesn’t feel right.’ I get it, it’s so normal. The idea that you have to make a song in a certain amount of time—you have forever time to do that. There’s no real pressure, unless there is actual pressure.”
“There’s imaginary pressure, for the most part,” Dickson picks back up, “but I think it’s also funny—as someone who literally had no experience in music-making, I also had a lot of opinions. But I think that works to our benefit, as well, because it’s just all over the place.” The way that Dickson goes about writing and creating music and its structure was so unconventional to Orofino that it’s now changed the way he considers all of it, too.
“The ideas you have are so fresh to me and so exciting that it took me a second to even understand the feeling that I was having when you would be like, ‘What if it just keeps going forever?’” he says to me, before turning back to Dickson. “That feeling, I didn’t understand. But I was like, ‘It’s risky and it’s exciting and it excites you, so you should do it.’ Listening to music and creating music like that now is just so cool, because you have such a different history with making a song. I definitely learned [from Dickson] how to ingest ideas differently and how to use instincts more than logic. Nothing has to be any sort of way. It could just be what you want. ‘Make what you want to hear.’ If you’re not doing that, then what are you doing?”
“A lot of things that would have stopped me from doing this, having Richard be there was just so beneficial to me growing as a person and becoming more comfortable outside of my comfort zone,” Dickson responds. “I truly feel like I’m living a bit of a dream life, in the sense that, if I was 10 and I told myself what I would be doing right now, it would feel so insane and so cool and so fun. I’d be excited.” Look at a song like “Toad Mode,” which was inspired by Allison’s cat, and you can find that silly but tender template that makes Sex Week such an easy group to fall in love with. Their connection is contagious; their desire to find charm strewn across unsettling surfaces is a sick, twisted amalgam of sinistry and hopeful wonder. The sound of a Sex Week song is, after you strip away the frills, the MIDI, the screams and the echoes, the musical personification of a couple huddling together for warmth inside an abandoned carcass.
The name Sex Week comes from The Bachelor, because Dickson and Orofino were watching it together while hanging out in Atlanta. It’s an allusion to the “fantasy suites,” which is a loophole in the show that allows the Bachelor to sleep with the women who aren’t his final pick. It’s a “hall pass,” if you will, but it’s never explicitly mentioned—except for the one time Dickson and Orofino were watching: “This bachelor slipped up and was like, ‘Okay, we’re finally ready for sex week!’ And then everyone freaked out and was like, ‘What the Hell?’ He got a lot of shit for calling it that, which I think is so funny,” Dickson says. “He didn’t coin it, right?” Orofino asks. “I think he might have coined it,” Dickson responds. “Well, maybe it was a fan term before, but he said it and it caused a hullabaloo.” At the Women Tell All portion of the show, an older lady in the crowd had DIY’d a white T-shirt to say “SEX WEEK” on it. “We were like, ‘That looks really cool. That looks like good merch,’” Dickson continues. “So we were like, ‘Sex Week!’ And then we were like, ‘Is that too much?’ But no other name stuck. Sex Week is perfect.”
Sex Week are a part of a beautiful, twee-oriented New York (City and State) scene that includes everyone from Bloomsday to h. pruz (and their equally phenomenal band Sister., and their DIY zine GUNK) to Big Dumb Baby to Grumpy to Margaux to Katy Kirby and even Babehoven and is this cultivation of earnestness en masse. It’s serendipitous, too, that Sex Week is a Best of What’s Next pick, because Dickson also happens to be the other person on the cover of Best of What’s Next alum Kirby’s Blue Raspberry cover. Dickson says that much of that is Orofino’s doing, that he’s built this community around himself. “It was such a wonder for me,” she says. “When I visited from Atlanta, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, look at this. Everyone’s just playing shows together and everyone knows each other.’”
Early on in their partnership as a band, Dickson and Orofino met El Kempner of Palehound and Christian Medrano of Precious Human, who they believe is a “connector and a force in the music scene” in Brooklyn and that his influence “seeps in everywhere.” “He’s like the rock,” Dickson says. “The mayor!” Orofino concurs. “I don’t think anything’s really happening like that anywhere else that I’ve lived,” Dickson admits. (What’s equally impressive is that, in the last 16 months or so, all of the aforementioned artists have made a lights-out record, which you can read about here, here, here, here and here.)
Sex Week is an EP full of juxtapositions. On a song like “Angel Blessings,” it’s very pretty until it becomes very strange and cataclysmic—full of MIDI strings and gargling, terrifying vocals, as if it’s some kind of fucked up, symphonic concerto. At one point, it sounds like you’re listening to an Alex G song from when he was still Sandy, and then you’re transported into a pasture of textures not unlike what Deafheaven was doing on Infinite Granite. For Dickson and Orofino, the choice to fill their turns with subversions is an intentional and subconscious effort, to revel in the mold is to live to see its pageantry. “It definitely comes from an intuitive place of ‘I just want to scream here,’” Dickson explains. “I love a song that has a journey or an arc, so I’m always pushing for an unexpected element in some way—but only if it feels right for the song.”
Orofino points to their playbacks of “Angel Blessings” and thinking the changes in the verses and choruses aren’t so drastic, but only because they have an unreleased song called “Shady Sadie” that features singing bowls, a fretless bass, chuggy, muted metal guitar sounds and a bunch of animals murmuring in the background while Dickson is yelling. “When we’re doing it, it feels pretty natural,” he says. “I’m like, ‘This is where it’s supposed to go.’ We’re both like, ‘Yeah, it could be louder. It could be darker.’” “I’m fighting for a trumpet, always,” Dickson replies. They both concede that some of their newer, still-in-the-vault songs have pedal steel, too.
The music video for “Cockpit” takes cues from David Cronenberg’s visuals (there’s also a reference to his movie Dead Ringers in the first verse), which feels like something that was cooked up in a lab for me (and possibly me only). Dickson’s penchant for gross phrasings on the EP, whether it’s her singing “drape me over, plump me up, unripe for slaughter” or “slipping out of my muck, I peel back, reveal the innards covered with red,” is anything but cliché. In the Sex Week canon, the gnarlier the image the better. It’s a language that sets the duo apart, and it’s their harmony of beauty and violence that cushions each tonal shift as it comes. Songs like “Naked” and “Toad Mode” have multitudes seeping out of wounds of madness like puss, and Sex Week lap it all up with hungry tongues.
“In a sense, I’m always listening to lyrics first,” Dickson says of her writing process. “A song can sound great and the production can sound cool, but if I don’t listen to the lyrics and glom onto them and find something personal about it, it’s hard for me to really love a song. That’s always what I think about when writing a song. What is the most interesting thing to pull a listener in, or what’s a feeling that’s evocative of what we’re trying to say? People can listen to a song and not even notice the lyrics, so it’s fun to create really gross and weird lyrics that people would either not even pay attention to or pay attention to and be like, ‘That’s so weird.’ I just loved the imagery of ‘drink me over, plump me up’—that’s so crazy and awesome to me, the imagery of that.”
Dickson’s songwriting style stands out, too, because it reeks of originality. There’s a deftness to how she surveys the world and all of the ways in which she chooses to describe them. A line like “it’s poured into my chest cavity” could be said in broader, more objectively tasteful ways to get the point across, but Dickson flourishes in incongruous storytelling rather than settling for something like “the heart of my sleeve, I’ll keep you there.” This fascination with turning the mundane inside out comes from foreign films and translated books, and Dickson found herself mining through an obsession with Korean cinema in 2021. “I think, a lot of times, translations from other languages—just through the captioning—can end up way more poetic that how an English film would sound, because there are so many more intricacies to different languages,” she says.
There are similarities between body horror and indie rock, at least in Sex Week’s eyes. “You’re contorting yourself to some sort of performance or extremity that, I think, is interesting,” Dickson says, laughing. “Maybe it’s more psychological horror.” “I do get it, though,” Orofino adds. “Body horror is gnarly, but it’s super poetic. It’s saying a different thing than it’s showing. They’re these very obvious analogies to something in the real world, whether it’s divorce or whatever. That’s like a lot of MJ Lenderman lyrics.” Dickson admits that she’s a squeamish person, and that there are a lot of body horror sequences that she can’t bring herself to look at—despite her lyricism often arriving like a romance conjoined with the slaughter of rot. But it was Cronenberg’s work that clicked for her innately, especially eXistenZ. “Watching them plug into each other is so gross and intimate, and it’s perfect,” she says. “They’re not having sex, but it’s sexual because it’s intimate. It’s bizarre and weird. You want to look away, but you want to look at it. Indie rock can totally feel like you want to look at it and you also want to look away.”
Though Sex Week is the first taste of what Dickson and Orofino have made together in such a short amount of time, they have a lot more material saved up. What this EP does, however, is exemplify a core love and a core trust shared between two musicians who, two or three years ago, were strangers sharing a mutual love for each other in unconventional, remote ways. “I think this first EP feels very young and explorative,” Dickson says. “Maybe it’s all over the place and it’s messy, but it also comes together in a way where it feels very open and soft. It’s just very intimate, and I think I learned how to tap into that more in a creative space while also exploring music videos and visuals and collaborating with another person. I’m such a loner, and I don’t know how to do any of that stuff. Then, just meeting someone that I really trust and want to work on stuff with, and want to figure it out with, is amazing. And it’s crazy.”
What gives a song its Sex Week sound is its duality and the combination of—and conversation between—two vocals, the contrast of a tenor and soprano wrapped around each other so delicately you might break it if you hold it too tight. Dickson and Orofino deliver mangled duets atop an unpredictable, sluggish, infinity symbol-gentle soundscape that’s leveled by a threaded baritone guitar and glittery, high-end backdrop collages. Strip back the layers of any track from the EP and there’s a pop song lingering in the architecture; it’s a rapture that gets spread over top of it. The duo never had any conversation about genre; Sex Week is succinct in its weirdness, flowing in and out of phrasings and arrangements like a wardrobe constantly in flux. Orofino points to that kind of sequencing being evocative of his own listening tastes, harkening back to his and Dickson’s mixtape beginnings. “The thing I listen to most is my ‘liked songs,’ which is insane, because there’s like full orchestral pieces and then there’s industrial stuff,” he says. “I like it, it makes sense to me.” “I think that’s who we are as people,” Dickson adds. “What we listen to is all over the place. We’re all over the place.”
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.