Girlpool

Girlpool’s Before the World was Big is the ultimate piece of bedroom pop: find two teenage girls with a guitar and a bass, find two strong voices singing in unison, find songs that try to make sense of growing up and leaving childhood behind and anything else that drifts into frame. Introverted and spare, their sound is reminiscent of ‘80s indie like that of Beat Happening, but singer-songwriters Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad add an element of arresting brashness and immediacy to their retro-adulation. Mostly it’s in those voices—not quite Kathleen Hanna-esque fuck-you shrill, but loud, assertive, and feminine enough that critics have said idiotic things like “It is like being cornered by a couple of characters from HBO’s Girls and made to listen to their boyfriend problems in excruciating detail.” (This casual misogyny brought to you by the fine folks of The Guardian.)

But Before the World was Big is emphatically not concerned with “boyfriend problems.” Its focus is squarely on that impatient, confused mentality of late teenage-hood, sometimes concerned with others but mostly wrapped up in who am I and why am I and what’s going to happen to me? kind of bullshit. It is present both in Tividad and Tucker’s words and in their sound, at times whispering but more often consciously projecting, fighting to be heard. “Do you feel restless when you realize you’re alive?”, they ask desperately in “Chinatown.” Likewise, in “I Like that You Can See It”: “My mind is almost 19 / And I still feel angry / I’m searching for the reason.”

Tividad and Tucker sing every song together, but the record nonetheless feels achingly lonely, like reaching out while totally afraid of being swallowed up. Like many works on adolescent confusion, Before the World was Big is fixated on loss: of childhood, of safety, of certainty. On the title track, they chant it like a mantra: “I just miss how it felt standing next to you / Wearing matching dresses before the world was big.” Girlpool incisively captures, in just ten short songs, that deep breath, that building up of courage, and that one last look back before charging out into the world.