By: Julia Ristoska

Leaving childhood and entering adulthood can be frightening and confusing at first. Sometimes it can feel so overwhelmingly complicated that you want to scream your head off. Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad from the duo group Girlpool began their career by streaming out their frustrations at the young age of 17. They started off being a couple of teenagers, created a friendship, and used music as their medium to understand the complexities of the world. They definitely made a drastic change from their self-titled 2014 EP. In comparison to their “Blah, Blah, Blah” days their 3rd studio album What Chaos Is Imaginary is much more sophisticated and constructed. They transition out from their awkward teenage phase and found their own sense of identity. In this album they no longer aggressively yell at each other;instead,these grown individuals engage in a full length inner conversation.

One of the major differences from Girlpool’s pervious albums is the vocals. This is the first album released since Tucker came out as transgender and started taking hormones that transitioned his voice into a lower tenor. Tucker said in an interview, one of the more difficult things about his transition “is feeling like my own voice is foreign to me.” Tucker is trying to rediscover who he is not just as an individual but also as a member in the band. His newly refined deep voice opens up on the first track, “Lucy”, as he sings, “An unfamiliar stage where you’d rather stay//A meditation plan when you sway and sink.” This melancholy indie rock tune discusses Tucker’s detachment of being on stage, but he knows it’s a place he belonged all along. He mentions it as a therapeutic place where he can “sink” into and feel comfortable in. His stretched out voice and slowed down tempo builds up providing an emotionally powerful wave of sound.

Ironically, the group is called “Girlpool” yet they are not quite swimming into gender conforming roles. They always challenge the ideas of what it means to be a “woman” in what they refer to as a “f*cked society”. A famous example is from their song “Slutmouth” from their self-titled EP. They sing, “Sometimes I wanna be a boy//Never really wanted girl toys” and “I don’t really care about the clothes I wear//I don’t really care to brush my hair//I go to school everyday//Just to be made a housewife one day.” Their lyrics are transparent and straight to the point. They do not hide who they are and showcase their real and genuine emotions and expressions through their music. With Tucker’s transition the duo still keeps the theme of finding their own sense of identity and individuality. They try to piece together broken fragments and build a unified bond and relationship with who they become.

The metaphor of drowning and sinking seems to occur throughout the album. It was mentioned in “Lucy” and reoccurs in “Where you Sink” where Tividad’s dream-like voice sings, “I know you live where you sink” and further sings “Go running around the alphabet sea//I wanna try to be a ribbon in a puzzle mind.” Her small voice feels distanced, and if you further listen her voice fades into a muffled whisper as if she was at the bottom of the ocean drowning.This is also seen in their instrumental piece “Minute in your mind” which consists of only a few lines. The instruments are drowning and the vocals are hidden in between the layer of guitars and synths. If you close your eyes and listen closely the lyric “you help me sink” surfaces over the hum of the guitars. Again the duo are trying to piece things together and keep afloat on top of the chaotic world.

Unlike their other albums one major difference is that many of the songs they were writing were written apart from each other. They lived in different cities and would send each other the tracks. The distinctive trait in Girlpool before was the overlapping vocals that fight against each other and become overwhelming to listen to. However, the layering of vocals is a very clever technique to express them unified as a whole but lost in a world that they don’t understand. The music is overpowering and their vocals drown in the chaos.

This contrasts with their new album in which there are two very distinctive voices. Tracks such as “Hire” and “Swamp and Bay” focus on Tucker’s voice without Tividad’s signature sweet voice overlapping. Tucker’s songs also give off a folksy rough tone with layers of brighter guitars in the background. Tividad’s most prominent song is the album’s title track “What Chaos is Imaginary”. It takes the spotlight with her hypnotic voice and classical string instruments intertwined with her dreamy voice. In an interview, Tividad mentioned she was having PTSD episodes and was having troubles getting in the present mindset and wasn’t able to focus on social situations so she wrote this song which is “about reckoning with this—trying to find a path to forgiving myself, attempts to redevelop a relationship with the world where I could find some illusion of ‘safety’ and belief in the fact that I could ultimately take care of myself.” The idea of the illusion and finding something to grasp onto is reoccurring in their more meditative dream-like songs like “Chemical Freeze and “Roses.” These ghostly songs focus on exiting one world and transferring into another. This refers back to them growing up from their troubled teenage years to finding their identity.

One thing that was recognizable was that there was two parts to the album. It was no longer Girlpool as a collective whole but Tuckers and Tividad’s own personal mini album in one greater album. Each song acts like a fragment; however, they still work as a unified piece. This album focuses on what Tividad calls “inner communication” which makes it more abstract and complicated which contrasts to their screaming transparent music before. This album is all about growth and finding their own identity in where they stand in the world, musically and within themselves.

And that must have been on chaotic episode to figure out.