Girlpool often seem like more of a friendship than anything resembling a professional band. Ten minutes before Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad are due onstage, for instance, you can spot them crouched beside the stage, poring over a notebook.
The power of their amity isn’t to be underestimated: pitch-perfect and in infallible unison, their raw sound is delivered with such intuition that the girls can’t help but grin as they toss the vocals between one another through Ideal World.
The LA duo haven’t been around long, but in that short time their sound has mellowed a little: the raucous shrieking that defined their sound for their first two years – think an angrier, more cynical Shampoo – has softened into unconventional harmonies and lyrical depth. Like nursery rhymes for the angsty teen, they raise big questions about existentialism, boredom and empowerment. “Everyone’s a prophet when they don’t know what to say,” they muse in Chinatown, then sweetly question whether they’re paying their parents enough attention in their debut album’s title track Before the World Was Big.
Their live show seems to showcase these nuances better than the album, with sudden crescendos and passages of falsetto-driven frenzy set against sweet melodies and simple guitar lines. Such aversion to sonic chaos means there’s considerable distance between them and their likely influences (they’re as much Kimya Dawson and her candid observations as Bikini Kill). Yet there’s still a punk-rock spirit here: each song is punchy and short, and songs such as Cherry Picking harness power from the sheer simplicity of being nothing more than a guitar, bass and two very caustic voices.
Girlpool are basically accidental fourth-wave riot grrrls – what began as a couple of teenagers recording onto a homemade cassette tape, later picked up by Wichita Recordings, is now growing into something far bigger than they could have possibly projected. The start of a beautiful friendship? In more ways than one.
