HARMONY - DYSTOPIA GIRL
Photo Credit: Harmony Tividad
In the months leading up to her debut solo EP, Harmony Tividad's Instagram shimmered with angelcore lacy lingerie and fluffy wings, stoner mermaid makeup and beach days, and juicy Y2K kitsch from parking lot soft serves to tutu-ed rides on Disney teacups (featuring a press piece in office magazine and its NYC billboards).
The native of the city of angels dedicated her high school years and early 20-somethings to singing, playing (the coolest of cool girl instruments) bass and guitar and songwriting in the two-piece girlpool, a project that spans from paisley garage-punk Powerplant, to emotive arts-and-crafts gothic Forgiveness, to bohemian, revelatory pop What Chaos Is Imaginary.
The double feature of Harmony's solo singles ‘Shoplifting From Nike’ and ‘Good Things Take Time’ was released in July 2023. Their pixieish stream-of-consciousness style, iridescent electronica and grungy shoegaze production anticipate her EP “Dystopia Girl”'s interplay of ornate surfaces and solemnity.
The music video for ‘Good Things Take Time’ sets up the character of the singer's 'dystopia girl'. Harmony takes on the role of a preacher and delivers a church service to a congregation of true-to-themselves baddies in praise of their being hot and making it through tough times, and she leads them into hopping into the back of a truck and spending the day on misadventures filled with esoteric dalliances that make one feel alive. The single glimpses into moments of spiralling fatalism but shines the spotlight on the supremacy of brilliant platinum bonds grown through dark times and trusting in the divine feminine to bring the things that we need into our lives at the right moment for them to be there. Harmony gives a vampiric vocal performance in an aural angel food cake layered with confetti-sprinkle-digital beats, large gemstoned-reverb and curly holographic sounds, thickly frosted with glossy topaz production.
‘Shoplifting From Nike’ slices at the glamorousness of self-aware, subcultural material obsession and the itching malaise of making it through every day in modern life, its music video rallying from arcade-dwellers in premium corsets and chopped-up mini-skirts drowning out the world to bikini-clad thieves in animal mascot-heads dancing through the fear of arrest to prom-ditching royalty encircling themselves in an empty Wonderland-esque carnival. Through the mixed usage of an effervescent hook strung with ultrabright synthetic beats and gloomy cybertronic beats, treated with a grimy, glittery production, Harmony strikes a balance between the ephemeral ecstasy of Sanrio character-bobbled thrills and the raw existentialism that sits in waiting to gnaw.
The EP’s first official number ‘Angel Kisses’ tip-toes around the flimsy chrome of superficial sex, the fragile wisps of love that come from heaven and hide out of plain sight, and finding true bliss and the road to a happy ending in the age of commercial machines in language oozing with dream-speak, spirituality and fantasy. Harmony is a seraph, stolen away in the wings of a cathedral since the 13th century. It feels like her voice soars through hallways and down corridors in the arrangement of a medieval hymn as piano keys chime like bells. This ethereality is interspersed by drifting through outer space inflected with the luminosity and haze of 1980s synth-pop.
‘I Am So Lucky and Nothing Can Stop Me’ is a work of white, crystal fae magic: in a silvery mermaid voice, Harmony incants a treasure box of manifestations ("Tears on my pillow will grow into flowers," "Day after day can look like forever / Everything stays but somehow gets better," "All of [life's] games will always amuse me"). These incantations float atop the fluttering wings of a luminous butterfly, a rocketing drumbeat made up of a million tiny, ultrabright beats, sparkling digital beats like drops of sunlight and glints off of a gemstone, and pieces of fizzing, jumpy static.
The EP's titular number: ‘Dystopia Girl’ ties up the project's ethos, as Harmony's voice becomes a haunted siren's call floating on the clouds of foggy pianos and nighttime synth-scapes reminiscent of a Mazzy Star lullaby and the weeping pastel ballads that play behind the Lisbon sisters' school dance in Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides.
On ‘Dystopia Girl’ Harmony upturns the tragic glamour and the gruesome underbelly of mental illness and self-mutilation in the name of beauty. She questions the male gaze by playing the part of a willowy, afflicted waif yearning for love to step in and cure her melancholy; and wonders about chasing after fantasy and intoxicating oneself on artifice as time's metal hands tick by. The singer-songwriter's sobering retrospections are captured in the song's new music video, with Harmony locking herself in a cupboard plastered in idyllic yet dramatically stylized ‘bad bitch’ images of herself and guessing at the meaning of life into the air.
Enter the Harmony-verse and see Dystopia Girl for yourself!
Cat Joy
★★★★★