Harmony Tividad: ‘Everything is constantly absurd as hell’

“Casios and Miley Cyrus and Oreos,” Harmony Tividad says. She’s listing a handful of things that coexist simultaneously to demonstrate the absurdity of life and how surreal it all really is. “No matter what we do, we’re constantly surrounded by things that don’t make sense together.” It’s a sentiment that, in the midst of a current timeline filled with UFOs, NPCs livestreams and Parisian bed bug infestations, feels ever more amped up. Especially as we’re sitting in the Natural History Museum, our afternoon spent amongst igneous rocks, ancient dinosaur bones and relics of human evolution. Through all these millions of years of history, this is the moment on planet Earth that we find ourselves amongst. “Everything is constantly absurd as hell,” Harmony adds, “and we all just walk around so whimsically”. 

The LA-based musician’s songwriting has always tapped into the wild realities of existence and poignantly grappled with the associated complexities of this through personal, poetic reflections, formerly as one half of Girlpool and now under her eponymous solo alias. With this new project, lustrous pop has become her palette to explore desirability, beauty standards and internal reckonings of being a hottie with a body in an unforgiving world that pits us against ourselves and each other. “I've been wanting to make pop music for like, seven years,” she recalls, “I’ve always been into historically classic pop songs and what makes a song have this like everlasting feeling”. 

While expressing herself through pop music, as on her debut solo EP Dystopia Girl, feels like something of a destiny for Harmony, the years in Girlpool paved the way for her to find her voice and present herself so viscerally through her work. “Me and Avery both needed Girlpool, especially starting so young, to build our creative confidence,” Harmony says. “When Girlpool started I was like I want my music to be punker. And Before The World Was Big was Math-y. I really liked Math-y music and things that were going against the grain more, even though pop was really natural for me to write”. In spite of pop offering this natural calling – there’s even a song from the early days of Girlpool that felt “way too poppy” that Harmony still has and which might “see the light of day” – there was internal reconciliation to work through, with the genre and Harmony’s relationship to it.

This stemmed from feelings of outsider-ism, which Girlpool was born out of, and a need to carve out a space of belonging, which Harmony found in the DIY scene through putting on and playing shows. “It’s a space where people can shape things into what they need them to be,” Harmony says, referring to the DIY community amidst which Girlpool was formed and nurtured; an environment that was instrumental in her journey as an artist and in finding confidence in herself, “that's invaluable,” she adds, “because in the real world, it’s hard to find spaces like that.”

For Harmony, this sense of alienation was also intertwined with notions of femininity and defining this on her own terms, something which is central to her new body of work. “A lot of my ideas about how Dystopia Girl’s interfacing with the complicated ideals of what it means to represent femininity,” Harmony says, “that’s something I’ve always had anger and internal trauma with, where I resent myself for wanting it.” Similarly, this extended to writing pop music which felt “not righteous” and “dirty”. Now, however, Harmony is allowing those parts of herself to exist. “I’m an artist who just wants to make my thing and I don’t want to have to live on the outskirts forever,” she says. 

When we speak, Harmony’s going through her Saturn return. She mentions that the night before her astrology chart revealed that her moon is in conjunction with her Saturn, “which is tension with femininity,” she explains. With her solo project, Harmony explores and presents a deeply personal embracing of love and femininity, in all its magic and violence. “I think pop music is interesting because it’s this super classic forum,” Harmony says, “we have all these ideas about people in pop music writing about pretty standard things. It’s exciting to be like OK, I want to talk about things that are more emotional, or deeper or more nuanced. But also the superficial is also equally as valuable”. 

While Harmony’s music offers raw introspection on self-worth, it also conveys a more optimistic self-acceptance. “A lot of songs I’ve written have been about extreme lows,” she says, referring to much of the songwriting with Girlpool. With her solo work, the emotive ponderance and existentialism are still there but they’re also intertwined with a levity and sense of wonder. On the penultimate EP track “I Am So Lucky and Nothing Can Stop Me”, there’s a line where Harmony sings “dreams are OK but waking is better,” something which offers a poetic glimpse of joy in the everyday. That isn’t to say that dreams aren’t a significant source of inspiration too – just that, for Harmony, reality and fantasy aren’t such opposing notions. “I feel like fantasy is just as real as anything else,” she says. 

Around the time that Girlpool were starting out, her mum had a psychic awakening – which, naturally, influenced the importance of magic for Harmony. “Magic has really overtaken my life in a very tangible way,” Harmony says. “I feel like if you observe reality and let yourself get close to it and believe you can see that there’s magic everywhere. I feel like I’ve always erred on the side of pessimism and I’m still pretty realistic even though I believe in magic.” This belief lends a glow to Harmony’s music, and also provides a vital tool for survival in the face of heavy realities. “I feel like with fantasy worlds, people need them to survive,” she says. “There’s a reason that stuff is so fucking popular. People need reprieve from the forces that are pummeling them.”

Reflecting on the project, Harmony says that she’s “still exploring what it is” with an emphasis on it being a malleable, multi-faceted vessel for authentic creativity. “In terms of processing pain and reality and just dealing with things, the only way I really know how to interface is by writing,” she explains, “I can’t not be thinking about poetry all the time”. Under her new solo alias, this manifests in a genuine and generous artistic expression, and a creative journey that feels like a blessing to witness as it continues.

‘Yesterday’ is out now

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