Girlpool
Forgiveness
ANTI-
Avery Tucker and Harmony Tividad of Girlpool are maximalists when it comes to experimentation within any genre. They don’t really work in half measures when they take on an album like Forgiveness. After 2019’s fuzzed-out rock on What Chaos Is Imaginary, the duo is now cataloging psychological tumult and making amends with themselves. Their new album is full of synths, big electronic beats, guitars, and plenty of melodic sincerity along the way.
The LP opens with the thumping electronics of early single “Nothing Gives Me Pleasure,” which centers on feelings of self-love, intimacy, and the desire to feel accepted by your community and the larger society beyond that. Girlpool’s career has certainly been one to showcase the power of transformation, and this first volley from Forgiveness sets an experimental tone for a record that loses its place at times within the spaces between its quick genre shifts.
The middle section of the album picks up steam again with “Faultline,” a heavier rock riff that ties back to previous efforts and the pair’s love of lo-fi pop and rock hooks. Tividad’s beautiful vocals lie at the center of the dark piece, with the lyrics in particular falling out in an emotional cascade (“So I will make your bed my graveyard / Between the edge of solitude and hope / There’s lots of ghosts I somehow still can see / Holding onto me for our dear life”).
Late-album genre rabbit holes like “Country Star,” “Butterfly Bulletholes,” and “Afterlife” are more sultry in nature, but not quite as affecting as the early singles that previewed the album. The LP still maintains the lovely vocals heard on previous Girlpool records that have come to be a hallmark for the group no matter what genre clothes they try on. Forgiveness is a multitude of things at one time, and that’s both its downfall and its triumph. After all the experiments are out of the system, Girlpool continues to be an intriguing project that never keeps itself contained, which is reason enough to keep checking out their genre lab every few years.
