Known for rendering the world through a quasi-surrealist lens, Los Angeles-based Girlpool—the very much living and breathing creation of Avery Tucker and Harmony Tividad—have only continued to prove never expect the expected from them. From their 2017 album Powerpaint, in which ‘Corner Store’’s 90-second eruption of feedback and distortion punctuated our indie-rock meets dream-pop expectations, to their 2019 What Chaos Is Imaginary, which moves effortlessly between meditative and crunching, bleeding, distorted rock to impressionistic dream pop, the band’s every twist and turn is utterly unique, ingeniously inventive and ever-exciting.
Portraying the anxieties of fear and joy and their intense juxtaposition within the current climate more aptly than most, we couldn’t wait to get our ears on their latest release ‘Touch Me (It’s Like I’m Winning It)’ and the remixes that followed. Released alongside an Amalia Irons-directed music video set in an Austin Powers-themed strip club, the song is charged, psychedelic and romantic in equal measures. Centred around the electricity in gaining someone’s attention and the consequent weight that often follows, the track is dream-like with aery vocals while a driving bass, flushed with multi-layered synth offers a sound that is both a new and welcome direction for the Los Angeles-based duo and an apt representation of the darkness and anxieties that surround us in our everyday lives in the current climate.
Mirrored in the beautifully directed accompanying video, while the lyrics are self-assured and confident there is a darkness and unease anchoring both track and video throughout. A distorted Indie anthem to bring in this ever-evolving apocalypse, it is hardly surprising the duo’s latest release was met with such attention and creativity in the form of three stunning remixes.
From the delay-dripping opening bars of Porches’ remix, which envelopes us throughout in panned gloriousness and multi-layered synth and drum machine-laden wonders, to Lydia Ainsworth’s somewhat darker, more cut-back, rhythmically experimental offering, every version leaves us wanting more while never detracting from the original heart of Girlpool’s creation.
Rounding off the EP of remix releases with an indulgent, smouldering take by the genius that is Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes, we cannot get enough of Girlpool’s latest release. Charged, other-worldly and an ever-apt reflection of the dualities that surround us within the current climate—our joys and our anxieties, our dreams-in-waiting and the reality around us—Girlpool’s latest offering is only a sign of greater things to come.
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