Although Girlpool only formed in 2013, the two young women – both of whom are scarcely out of their teens – have expressed great interest in making music since a very early age. “I played guitar for the first time when I was seven,” says guitarist/co-vocalist Cleo Tucker. “I knew from that point on that I had found something that was going to be a huge part of my life. I never wanted to do anything else. Playing music and writing words for it was all that interested me.”
“My dad was a bass player,” says bassist/co-vocalist Harmony Tividad. “When he realised I was interested in playing music, he showed me how to play and really encouraged me. I sang in choir all through school and I got my first guitar when I was 13. I had piano lessons too, but they never really stuck when I was a kid.”
Girlpool’s debut album, Before the World Was Big, was released back in June. Clocking in at just 24 minutes, it’s an album that makes great use of its running time; Tucker and Tividad filling its brief stay with inventive lyricism and warm, layered vocals atop lush, intertwining guitars. For a band still in relative infancy, there’s a considerable degree of certainty to the sound of the album. This, according to Tividad, was a reaction to the band’s debut release.
“The start of Girlpool is kind of interesting,” she says. “The first EP that we put out [2014’s Girlpool] was kind of rushed – it was strung together really quickly within two months. We just wanted something to sell at shows, because we’d just started touring. When it came to the first song we wrote for When the World Was Big, which ended up being Ideal World, we actually decided to sit down and properly explore what our sound could be. We had a lot of lengthy conversations about it, and then see how we could reflect our love of melody and counter-melodies in both the music that we were playing and the harmonies that we were singing. There’s been a real change in the way that we make music together, and I think this album reflects that.”
Everything you hear on Before the World Was Big was performed by Girlpool’s two constituents. They refrained from bringing in additional studio musicians, and they don’t even use a drummer. It’s this stripped-back and almost primitive approach to making music that has fascinated audiences across the world – including Australia, where the band will soon visit for the first time. Although some publications have made quite a point of their minimal setup, the duo insists they were never interested in pleasing outsiders.
“It was a really organic collaboration,” says Tucker. “I think we were drawn to one another purely because we could both see that we really felt passionate and serious about making things, even though we were young. We both believed in the fluidity of creativity, so I think we were attracted to that in one another. It’s blossomed into this partnership, which has become really revealing and eye-opening for us.”
BY DAVID JAMES YOUNG
