Lea Garn
The outsized characters in Harmony’s candy-colored absurdist pop universe are depictions of a thoroughly modern type of malaise. “I’m a bored American, giving birth to my iPad kid,” she sings on “Miss America” over grinding synths and a smutty beat. On “Thot Daughter,” she declares herself “the people's princess of the housing crisis” in a song that pokes holes in the moral panic over sexuality and gender. Instead of preaching or offering a solution, however, Harmony dreams of a different kind of escape: “I wanna log right out of this world,” she sings with a sigh in her voice.
Harmony is the persona that allows musician Harmony Tividad to pry behind the metaphorical white picket fences of suburbia and peek at what is going on behind closed doors: vanity, moral bankruptcy, rising levels of debt, and terminal apathy. “We exist in this world where we're always framing ourselves as the victim,” she says from the lobby of a hotel in Paris in the middle of fashion week. “But we're not just the victim, sometimes we're the villain. I think it's beautiful how people can coexist as both things.”
On the surface it all seems a long way from Girlpool, the band Tividad formed with Avery Tucker in the early 2010s after they met at Los Angeles’s DIY venue The Smell. After putting out four albums of stripped-down and emotionally raw music together, including their final album, Forgiveness, in 2022, they encouraged each other to “stretch and evolve” moving forward.
Lea Garn
For Harmony, that evolution began soon after she started making her “freaky electronic demos,” and now ends with Gossip, her debut album, out October 11. The project finds nuance among the “hysterical glamor” of her music; a whirring and crunching throwback to 2010s EDM-adjacent pop largesse, where Lady Gaga emerged as a star similarly able to synthesize theatricality amid bottle-popping excess. It’s in this space that Harmony creates a portrait of people as both wounded and savages, while never losing sight of how both are creations of a time where technology warps self-image.
Read on for the musician’s recollection of her journey from the end of Girlpool until now, as well as her thoughts on the themes of Gossip, obsession as a muse, and the current pop landscape.
The FADER: There is a line on “Stereo” where you sing, “The good girl is such a cliche, I love acting the wrong way.” That kind of feels like a catalyst for the whole album. What is it about the “bad girl” trope that you find exciting as a musician?
Harmony: I’m just very interested in bad, complicated people. I have a really intense hyperfixation on doing the right thing, and being that way just creates a lot of shame and guilt around doing anything incorrectly. Girlpool was so catharsis-oriented and about exploring my feelings emotionally; I was excited to be more intellectual and cerebral about processing these feelings of shame and guilt in different aspects of my personality and playing with performing things that are considered incorrect and shameful. I have felt like I am the wrong person so many times, and I just wanted to normalize things that I have felt wrong for in the past. I'm practicing it to extremes in this music. It’s like exposure therapy, almost. If I worry that doing tiny things is bad, then what if I made a song about being the worst version of myself?
You came up through the indie rock world, where sadness and self-doubt can often be the default. Is Harmony a rejection of what can be quite a suppressed environment?
I still make music in that style, and I have a bunch of [those songs] on my computer, but when we were in Girlpool, we felt locked in one specific zone. So I’m enjoying the freedom. I’m a musical theater kid, and I love emo and pop music. The goal for me right now is to build a world that feels refreshing to be in.
What’s complicated is that when I was in Girlpool, I was the craziest version of myself and kind of the worst version of myself in a lot of different ways. I was very mentally unwell and was going through a lot. The music I was making [in Girlpool] was self-deprecating and self-doubting, but this [current music] is more of a reflection of who I was at that time. I was going out every single night and pushing my body and mind to a place that was not healthy. That’s not the case any more. There is a funny irony in what I'm presenting now and what I was presenting in Girlpool, versus what was going on behind the scenes.
Do you see any shared DNA between Girlpool and what you’re doing as Harmony?
The ethos is very similar, and I think that was kind of overlooked [in Girlpool]. “Miss America” is very “Ideal World”-esque or “Slutmouth” with the lyrical in-your-face-ness. The reason it worked in Girlpool is because the music was so sparse and subdued, so it felt less aggressive. Now the lyrics are paired with in-your-face music, and I think that can feel alarming, comparatively. The thing that was punk about Girlpool was that we were doing things by our rules. When you look at the lyrics and the tone and the direction of Girlpool and Harmony, it feels very clear that it's coming from the same angle.
“Miss America” is both a celebration and a condemnation of Los Angeles. What role did moving back home have on the making of this album? Does Harmony even exist if you hadn't left Philadelphia?
L.A. is definitely in the DNA of everything I do. With Girlpool it was about rejecting it and turning away from what was painful. I was a very angry person at that point in my life and felt like such an outcast and an outlier, so I moved away.
With this project I have been coming to terms with that pain and also finding joy and humor in it. It has been healing for me after so long of me feeling like I didn't belong there. This music, “Miss America” especially, relates to feeling a lot of pressure growing up to be a specific type of girl, and to exist in a specific type of way, and look a certain way. I was not physiologically structured in the way a lot of girls were growing up. I've had hormone issues my whole life that contributed to neuroses and self-consciousness. So I am playing with how I can embody that energy of ideal femininity, but also make fun of it. It’s fun to play and to heal the wounds.
You have mentioned Moulin Rouge as a reference for the whole Harmony project. What else is on the mood board?
I love Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. I really identify with things that are stark and bright. I really love Videodrome and Twin Peaks, too. Musically, I love Madonna and Lady Gaga, of course, but then I'm really inspired by Guided by Voices.
Lea Garn
Your song “Romeo” is a vivid portrait of a particular dynamic within a relationship. I was wondering if you could kind of tell me what you were exploring with that song.
Somebody very broadly described the plot of [Netflix’s] Baby Reindeer to me, and I wanted to write a song about obsession. People are constantly cycling through projection and obsession with people in the world, obviously not to the degree in [Baby Reindeer]. But even casual crushes I hear about my friends having, how much projection goes into that, how much goes into people I've been into in the past that were just, like, not even remotely emotionally available.
You see it online, too, in the relationships between fans and musicians. How do you feel seeing artists struggle to establish boundaries between themselves and their audience?
It's so gnarly. It reminds me of that [Nikola] Tesla quote, “You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.” It is just so disturbing to watch from a distance. The amount of information people assume they have about other people because of something they've written, or that they have access to them because of this intimate work they've shared, is really quite sad.
I honestly think a lot of the artists that are experiencing this should just be offline, but no one can be offline because that's where their work is. It’s like Stockholm Syndrome, and the internet is the prison. I am really grateful to have never experienced that, but I have friends that have been through similar things and have talked to me about it. People need to realize that just because they have access to someone's work, or hear something online, doesn't mean they understand them on any fundamental level. It's the misinformation Olympics out there.
This might be misinformation, too, but I read that you DJed at Charli XCX's birthday party.
I was behind the decks. The Dare was DJing, and I was like, “Let me get on.” So I DJed, but I was definitely not supposed to; I wasn't asked to. I was just being a mischievous little bitch. It was more of an invasion than a DJ set. I played “TikTok” by Kesha. I didn’t know Charli and Lorde were dancing, and it was a whole thing. I put on their song [“Girl, So Confusing”], and then it was a whole thing. I was like, “Oops.” I was just so oblivious and being a goof. Sometimes I don't know what's going on, and then it's a moment, and I'm like, “Oh, how nice.”
