It's Harmony's World, We're Just Living In It

HARMONY wears TOP by POSTER GIRL, SHOES by POSTER GIRL, JEWELRY by ALEXIS BITTAR 

With tracks like "Shoplifting From Nike" and "Good Things Take Time," she deftly embraces the infectious lilt of pop sensibility while plumbing the depths of vulnerability hidden beneath the surface. Her music videos, dripping with excess and extravagance, challenge the facade of effortless perfection that often dominates the realm of social media, offering a refreshing glimpse of authenticity. There's a thematic thread that weaves from the tracks on Girlpool's last album, Forgiveness, to songs like "Dystopia Girl" and "Angel Kisses," all exploring the journey of connecting with oneself in new and sincere ways.

From the enigmatic oeuvre of David Lynch, which illuminates the subtleties of the feminine experience, to the unvarnished exploration of self that accompanies shedding negative habits and perceptions, Harmony's influences are as varied as they are profound. Her lyrics, like keys, unlock invisible trap doors along the boulevards of Hollywood; perhaps, if you tilt your head just right, you might be fortunate enough to see the world through her eyes, even if just for a fleeting verse.

It's a moment suffused with relief, a culmination of time and dedication, and the keen realization that this music is meant to be shared.

TOP: HARMONY wears DRESS by ZOE GUSTAVIA ANNA WHALEN, SHOES by ACNE STUDIOS, JEWELRY by ALEXIS BITTAR 

BOTTOM: HARMONY wears BODYSUIT by NGUYEN INC., SHOES by PRADA, JEWELRY by ALEXIS BITTAR 

What was the definitive moment that led you here, about to release your first EP as “Harmony” not Harmony Tividad or Girlpool?

Well I've been working on solo music for years and some of these songs were recorded close to when we were recording and finishing the last record as Girlpool so they've been kind of cooking in the oven for a while. I had been eager to, but I just didn’t have the infrastructure to create it in a meaningful and intentional way until recently. I feel so relieved because I’ve wanted to put out this music for a long time, and right now feels like the perfect culmination of time and things aligning to allow this to be.  

Is it empowering to work under your own imprint for the first time?

It’s so great. I mean, I love making songs and I love when things like the lyrics are outlandish and even some of the lyrics are outlandish so it's really nice being able to put out exactly what I want.

I could imagine. It must be so nice to not have an outside force basically filtering what you create. At what point did you write the opening track “Angel Kisses”? And what followed after?

So that one was written right around September, like between August and October of 2021, then I recorded it with my friend Oscar in December of 2021. I still have some weird, funky demos of it actually. So it was almost fully realized then, which was a long time ago, now. Then the last track “Dystopia Girl” was started around the same time and I finished it in February 2022. “Good Things Take Time” was written in January 2022. I wrote “Shoplifting From Nike” like five months ago, and “I Am So Lucky And Nothing Can Stop Me” in January of this year. I feel like it’s hard putting music out because there are other songs I have in the works that aren’t quite ready yet, but these five feel most realized and good to me right now. 

The tracklist is so nicely balanced. 

I’m so happy with it. I feel like my personal mantra, and what the EP is about, examines the absurdity of being a person and having to balance the conflicting emotions that come with that. Sometimes I have a great deal of confidence in myself and other times I can feel extremely fragile and vulnerable, like I have no idea what’s going to happen next, and I think that I’m really interested in writing music about the space between those two things and how they coexist. The older I get, the more secure I become, but the amount of time that I spend uncertain is probably almost the same as when I was younger.

That’s such a great point and I feel like it’s more complicated now with social media as there can be such a dissonance between how someone feels online and real life. Someone can be so confident when interacting with people in person, but insecure about what they post, and vice versa.

How have you navigated that while fostering a new identity outside of your role in Girlpool?

Girlpool was so formative for both Avery and I, and like, literally taught us how to have certainty in our work because we started it so young that like, I don't think either of us ever thought, ‘We are serious artists.’ We were just friends having fun and writing and making things and it was what we love to do and still love to do. However, the older I got, the more my trauma became clear to me so what inspired me and made me feel validated, started to shift. I started to realize like, I had all these qualms with Los Angeles, with how I felt about myself growing up, about beauty and femininity and like belonging in that way. 

I started to see work that was camp and over the top – I’ve always loved theater – and reached a point where I understood how all my interests intersected. I’m super interested in theatrics and vulnerability through performance and over-performance. There’s a rawness to things being oversaturated that feels honest and is fun to play around with.

Are there any influences that come to mind?

David Lynch's work and how he processes and plays with the feminine experience, which made me realize how there's so many amazing ways to play with femininity and not feel like a victim of it and that’s been really healing with me. “Dystopia Girl” really reckons with this ideal femininity that feels inaccessible, because it just doesn’t exist. 

You make me think about "Dragging My Life Into a Dream" on your last project as Girlpool.

Well Avery wrote that one so I wouldn't say that it exactly defines my narrative, but "Faultline", which is also on that record feels connected to “Angel Kisses” in a way. “Faultline” explores themes of wanting to break out of patterns, being unable to and reckoning with that self-awareness and accepting yourself, but it’s also about becoming bigger than the path you’ve created for yourself to follow. And then the overarching element of “Angel Kisses” is wanting love from another, but at its core, it's about the dream of a life where you choose yourself and in that it's natural for someone else to choose you as well.

HARMONY wears BODYSUIT by NGUYEN INC., SHOES by PRADA, JEWELRY by ALEXIS BITTAR 

I feel like it’s only recently I realized how influential our self-perception is. Do you feel tuned into a new frequency as you navigate this pop chapter of your sound?

I feel like the pain and struggle that I've experienced and the mental processes and issues that I experienced as a young adult has evolved into an immense feeling of gratitude, empathy and appreciation for myself. It doesn’t mean that those feelings aren’t present anymore, but I’m not as critical of myself for my actions, I’ve come into myself in a way where the things that I’ve experienced are starting to make more sense and that does seem to come through in the music I’m making now. I used to have some really negative habits that I’ve broken out of for the most part. When I was younger I used substances in a way that are ineffective for making your life better and realizing that put me in such a better place.

How does it feel knowing that in ten days the project is finally out? 

Oh, I don't know. It's so crazy honestly because I feel like I have been so fixated on the deadlines that I’ve had to meet that I haven’t had a second to actually process that we’re right at the very end, but when you phrase it like that, I just feel so relieved honestly. 

The two songs that we led with are the most different from anything else I’ve done, like the three others have a similar energy to other things I’ve put out so I like that the opening to this project has been saturated and over the top because that's a more vulnerable side of myself that I haven't like played with or given light to. Putting out “Shoplifting from Nike” was extremely vulnerable for some reason, because I revealed parts of myself that I hadn’t shed or talked about in songs before. 

You mentioned that the “Dystopia Girl” music video drops the same day, are you excited about that too? 

So excited! The set design was super cool. Every wall, including the floor and ceiling, were covered in the album cover and other pictures of me – we even made this huge cut out of myself. I wanted to capture the feeling that people get when they see pictures of themselves and feel like they’re distorted or unfathomable in some way.

The funny thing about the song is that the opening line is, ‘I've got nothing but love’ and then you see a room full of pictures of me, like, there’s something so wrong and disturbing about it, but that dissonance is what makes it the right thing I think. Just because there’s this pop sensibility to something doesn’t mean that there’s not an underbelly of self-consciousness and confusion, which was fun to play with. 

Totally. I’m so excited to see it. I feel like it’s going to be insane. 

I was just reading this book – a self-help book of course because I love those, like I literally read them for fun. But it explored the idea that no one is ever thinking about you the same amount that you're thinking about you, which with the internet and influencer culture and all this different shit, is so funny because we’re almost encouraged to be self-obsessed because it is more beneficial to your well-being. Like if you’re trying to do anything in the arts, your internet shit is extremely consuming and I think it’s silly and important to play with that because the neuroses of the images that we create is so real, and I know a lot of people who are very plagued by these images like I once was. 

The images on social media evolve into more of a performance of effortlessness every day, like now what gets the most likes are photos that seem randomly taken as if they aren’t posed but they actually are. It’s so absurd. 

That’s so true, it’s so interesting. 

I love that there’s this over-performance to the music videos for “Shoplifting From Nike” and “Good Things Take Time” that contradicts that performance of effortlessness people have become so accustomed to. It’s very early 2000s, which is also very nostalgic. 

Yeah exactly, it’s so camp. I’m just a theater loving ho who is always thinking about what it means to be alive, but I also just want to have a good time. I think there’s a seriousness and levity to it all, simultaneously. It’s been really nice to work on this and start to think about what’s next on the horizon, like I have a lot of songs that are already recorded so I’m excited to focus on figuring out which ones are going to become the next moment.

HARMONY wears JACKET + SKIRT by HEAVEN by MARC JACOBS, SHOES by POSTER GIRL, and JEWELRY by ALEXIS BITTAR

How long did it take to feel good about these five songs? And were they always in the same order?

I know that order is important, but I’m such a weird ho when it comes to that. It’s not super intuitive to me honestly so the order for this one was just kind of in the works and I had people helping me. I can get down with the details, but I’m more of a big-picture driven person anyway. When something hits for me, that’s what gets me into writing and creating melodies. 

That makes sense. What was it like being in New York and being able to shoot things while you were here?

It was so fun to be there for a reason, like I’ve lived in New York before and it can honestly be so overstimulating and hard to find a direction, but because I was there working, and meeting so many good-hearted beautiful people through the projects I did, I had such an amazing time. I left saying that I didn’t want to leave and I was there for only six days. Everyone was so sweet. It was beautiful. 

Did the trip feel fated in a way?

Yeah totally. I mean the trip felt so right, like I fully believe in alignments and that if you can take signals from the world around you, you can figure out if you’re positioning yourself in the right place, because sometimes things will work out even when you don’t expect them to and that’s when you know you’re on the right path. I definitely feel like this is 100% where I need to be. 

There’s also this self-consciousness that’s coming with it, which feels healthy and like a necessary part of being a creative person that Avery and I didn’t get to experience much as part of Girlpool because we were a part of something outside of ourselves to attach to that didn’t necessarily represent us directly. So doing that has been healing, yes, but it’s also been so scary because it’s something I’ve never done before.

Almost like you didn’t expect the water to be so deep when you jumped in but you’re just kind of coasting now. 

Exactly and it’s so cool. I'm glad that there's this emotional and spiritual element for me because I didn't expect to feel those feelings at all and it’s shown me that there’s so much more that comes with sharing these new parts of myself through music and I’m just eager to go deeper and see what will come of it. There’s something about living in your absolute that’s so liberating and terrifying and cool, to move in your power even though you’re afraid. I encourage everyone to try it. There's a very high element of feeling alive in that.

HARMONY wears TOP by NOAH KANTROWITZ, SKIRT by SANDY LIANG, BOOTS by FIDAN NOVRUZOVA, JEWELRY by ALEXIS BITTAR