Girlpool "Forgiveness" LP (2022)

Details: Girlpool "Forgiveness" LP (2022, ANTI-). Black vinyl, new stock, sealed. Girlpool's final album.

Description: Just like they did for What Chaos Is Imaginary, Harmony and Avery each wrote their Forgiveness songs separately, then came together to decide how to present them in a style that felt representative of what excites and inspires them now. This time, the process resulted in their slickest and most ambitious music to date, filled with idiosyncratic and provocative gestures that simultaneously support and complicate the
emotionally intricate material. With its unique blend of introspective earworms and surreal party music, Forgiveness reaches beyond the loosely sketched parameters of “indie rock,” challenging any preconceived notions of what a Girlpool album can or should be.

That growth manifests beautifully on “Faultline,” the new record’s woozily elegant first single. Every week keeps slipping by/in this imitation paradise, Harmony sings, her voice angelic-sounding atop a loungey, vertiginous groove. “Faultline” is an effective introduction to the world of Forgiveness, and not just because it alludes to the seismically tenuous landscape that backdrops several of the album’s songs. The notion of straddling a fault line feels somewhat indicative of Forgiveness on the whole. These songs investigate the always-shifting boundaries between a number of elementally human concepts: pain and pleasure, sex and love, reality and delusion, insecurity and confidence, grief, and growth.

“A lot of my songs on this record are about relationship dynamics where I experienced frustration and pain, and struggling to hold a lot of complexity in my emotions” Avery explains. “Writing Forgiveness helped me fit all those pieces into an acceptance: that my fate pushes me exactly where I need to go.” Harmony feels similarly: “A lot of life feels like unavoidable experiences to me,” she adds. “To me, Forgiveness is about accepting that concept. It’s about forgiving reality for having to be exactly what it is
all the time.”

Grade: M (new stock)

TRACK LISTING SIDE A:

A1. Nothing Gives Me Pleasure
A2. Lie Love Lullaby
A3. Violet
A4. Junkie
A5. Dragging My Life Into A Dream
A6. Faultline

TRACK LISTING SIDE B:

B1. Light Up Later
B2. Country Star
B3. Butterfly Bulletholes
B4. Afterlife
B5. See Me Now
B6. Love333