Girlpool have announced that they are breaking up this year. “After nine years, we have decided to take a break from Girlpool and go our separate ways as songwriters,” Avery Tucker and Harmony Tividad shared in a statement. Their forthcoming tour, which begins on September 8, will now serve as their farewell tour. They’ve also canceled a series of dates from their itinerary.
“This upcoming tour will be our last one—it will be an ode to the past, a celebration for the future, and something we will pour both of our hearts into completely,” they said. “We are each other’s biggest fans and always encourage each other to stretch and evolve, whether that means it’s alongside one another or not.”
Tucker and Tividad met as teenagers at the venerated Los Angeles DIY venue the Smell and formed Girlpool shortly after. Their debut self-titled EP was released on Bandcamp in 2014. It was followed by 2015’s Before the World Was Big, 2017’s Powerplant, and 2019’s What Chaos Is Imaginary. Their last album, Forgiveness, came out earlier this year.
The new album Forgiveness, according to Tividad, came as she experienced a newfound comfort after living with anxiety and chronic illness. “Once I started to feel better, it opened a lot of doors, because for the first time I could just allow myself to be myself,” told Crack’s Niloufar Haidari this year. The record also shows Tividad’s attempt through songwriting to practice self-forgiveness. “[The songs] are predominantly about trying to transcend the dark parts of myself,” she told Crack. “Overcoming hedonism or inner demons… most of my songs are an unpacking of, ‘Why do I keep not loving myself, or prioritizing that I can be loved, over pleasure-seeking behavior?’”
Tucker, who came out as a trans man in 2017, has spoken in interviews about wrestling with how different Girlpool’s early music sounded compared to their more recent work. “It can be so frustrating to look at the streaming [numbers] and see that Before the World Was Big is getting equal to or more than the new stuff,” Tucker told Rolling Stone’s Jonathan Bernstein earlier this year. “There’s a part of me that’s like, ‘Oh my God, I feel trapped in my past.’ But we have to trust that there’s some lesson in letting that be. I think being visible is part of the power in Girlpool. Because, for me, there’s shame, a little bit, in that music. It feels embarrassing and it feels really feminine. But there’s also such deep love and sweetness and tenderness, because it was so innocent, and our hearts were so open to one another, and so vulnerable, and we were so young. It’s actually so cool that we were so down to open the fuck up.”
