POWERING THROUGH
Girlpool tours behind new album after successful debut
Cleo Tucker is on the way to Denver for a show and resting a little.
“We’ve played four shows, and I’ve just had my wisdom teeth pulled,” Tucker says. “Today it’s the most tender.”
Tucker is a member of the indie punk band Girlpool. Joining Tucker is Harmony Tividad.
The band is touring in support of its album “Powerplant.”
Girlpool has been on the fast track since the release of its debut album, “Before the World Was Big.”
That was when Tividad and Tucker moved from Los Angeles to Philadelphia.
“Before BTWWB, I was just out of high school, living in my old neighborhood,” Tucker recalls. “Then we started touring in a way we’d never done before. I really started to experience the duality that was beginning to exist in my life: tour/not on tour.”
After a chaotic and informative year spent floating around the East Coast, both bandmates moved home to California at the start of 2017.
Over 10 days in Aug. 2016, Girlpool holed up at the Los Angeles-area Comp-ny studios to record and mix “Powerplant” with Drew Fischer.
For the first time, the two musicians were joined by a third performer, drummer Miles Wintner.
The decision to add percussion came naturally, Tucker says.
“We were living in different places for a period of time,” Tucker says. “More of the record was written separately. We worked a lot in Philly and in New York. We would send downloads to each other when we weren’t together. It was pieced together.”
The musicians are heavily inspired by Elliott Smith, The Cranberries, Cocteau Twins, Brian Eno, Arthur Russell and Graham Nash.
With those musicians as inspiration, the pair wanted to be as honest with writing the songs for “Powerplant.”
“I see vulnerable softness as a place where the honest self can come forward,” Tucker says of the writing process.