Photo courtesy of Girlpool.
Harmony Tividad and Avery Tucker (Girlpool) have always been probingly introspective. On their new song, Tividad takes a hard look at a toxic thought pattern in which she found herself trapped during a period of profound crushing. "Nothing Gives Me Pleasure" is the final single from the duo's fourth studio album, Forgiveness, due out April 29 on ANTI-. It follows "Lie Love Lullaby," "Faultline," and "Dragging My Life Into a Dream" in the record's release cycle, but it's the project's opening track.
In the new song, Tividad sings through an Auto-Tuned gloss over a slow, glitchy drum machine and two synth organ chords that spread out beneath her. "Do you even want me if I even have to ask? / Break it to me gently with your fingers up my ass / Kiss me like you mean it / Though I don’t know what you’re meaning," she begins, begging a careless partner for brutal mercy. The track's Aerin Moreno-directed video finds the duo arriving as a couple to a party — Tucker in a tracksuit and chain and Tividad in a corset and heavy makeup — where he immediately ditches her to flirt with other women while she takes selfies in a corner.
“'Nothing Gives Me Pleasure' is about trying to love yourself when it feels like no one else will,” Tividad explains. “It was written during a time when I was working so hard to get someone specific to love and recognize me. On the path to doing that, I diluted myself so much that I lost sight of my own needs. This video plays with the lengths we go to to feel loved and how so many faces of intimacy may disguise what love actually looks like to us specifically. I have a history of getting lost in the labyrinth in the struggle for affection. In this video I wanted to interface with my own patterns in the attempt to better see and love myself.”
Watch below.
