girlpuppy - Sweetness (Bubblegum Pink Vinyl)

When beginning work on the second girlpuppy album, Sweetness, Becca Harvey realized the record-making process itself would be almost as important as the final product. On her first album of alt-pop anthems—2022’s gorgeous, folk-infused When I’m Alone—the 25-year-old Atlanta-based singer-songwriter often felt like she was working in the shadow of her collaborators, writing words to their melodies and deferring to their creative impulses. Made on the other side of a relationship where she often felt marginalized, Sweetness felt like the right project for Harvey to rethink her creative approach and work solely from her own lyrical and melodic ideas. The result of this process was a darker, more texturally expansive record than its predecessor, full of heart-rending songs about pushing back against self-blame and doubt. From its heavy-duty sonics to its naturally flowing melodies to its emotionally generous lyrics, every element of Sweetness exudes confidence, capturing Harvey relishing raw creativity and trusting her inclinations. The record takes place within that moment all artists wait for: when their “voice” becomes so clear, they realize they can just open their mouth and start speaking in it. Freed from the nagging insecurity that she couldn’t be a songwriter without playing an instrument—she cites The National’s Matt Berninger as an inspiration—Harvey began Sweetness by recording full-length acapella voice memos. To find a backdrop for the vocals, Harvey delved into her diverse, lifelong set of musical reference points, from the country and Top 40 pop she grew up on in small-town Georgia to the later favorites that expanded her idea of what songwriting could achieve: Elliott Smith, Lana Del Rey, Yo La Tengo, and more. With the help of Asheville-based producer/co-writer Alex Farrar and additional co-writers Tom Sinclair and Holden Fincher, Harvey pinpointed a sweet spot between shoegaze, dream-pop, and pop-rock anthems from the turn of the millennium. The arrangements are sometimes nostalgic and always viscerally satisfying in their trajectories, powered by chunky sheens of distorted guitar in the choruses, drums played as hard as pop-punk hits from her youth (“Since April,” “For You Too”), and poison-sweet hooks invested with both defiance and desire. Harvey’s friends from throughout the indie rock world helped fill out these arrangements: Horse Jumper of Love’s Dimitri Giannopoulos, The War on Drugs’ Dave Hartley, Beach Fossils’s Tommy Davidson, and more.Lyrically, Harvey is witty and unsparing throughout Sweetness, taking inspiration from the break-up lyricists she reveres, from Leonard Cohen to Avril Lavigne. Her memory is acute, accounting for nooks and crannies of romantic relationships history that lesser songwriters might skip over. “I Just Do!” is told in an elegantly scrambled montage that we don’t need to know the frame narrative to understand, capturing that dopamine-filled urge to drop out of existence just to stay in bed with someone a little bit longer. An urgent, ’90s-pop snare pattern kicks in when Harvey recalls: “I love it when I make your friends laugh/I love how much they love you/And all the fun that you guys have.” These songs sparkle with details like this, mini-scenes that help create a 360-degree view of heartbreak.Inside jokes give depth to moments of both grieving and annoyance, even when their context isn’t fully clear. In “I Was Her Too,” she references The Waterboys’ 1985 hit “The Whole of the Moon” to describe feeling alienated by random musical overtures from an ex (“Did you really see the crescent?/I don’t even know what that means”). Harvey explains: “The person that [‘I Was Her Too’] is about sent that song to me and said it reminded him of me, and I never knew why. I was like, ‘I don't know if that was like a good or bad thing,’ because when I listen to the song, I'm like, ‘Okay, like, I guess so.’” It’s both a funny and poignant moment: Unresolved questions about a person you loved—even slight or ridiculous ones—take on a bittersweet profundity once you accept that you may never have answers to them.For Harvey, the other major quotation on Sweetness points toward something at the heart of the record for her. The gauzy and melodically stunning “Windows” incorporates a twinkling keyboard line inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s “Silver Springs.” When Harvey mentioned the riff to her co-writer Alex Farrar as “the most iconic part of [‘Silver Springs’]’’ he replied: “It's funny because that's not the most iconic part of the song, but to you it is, and you need to include it. That's why it's so special, this record.” Harvey speaks about this interaction with a hint of emotion in her voice. “I think about that whenever I listen to the song, because I thought it was so funny but also profound.” Finding and articulating her unique perspective, and having it be met with reverence and respect, felt like a big deal even in the smallest moments of making Sweetness. In every way, the album is about these issues: finding your story, sticking to it, and judging what is important according to your own value set. Mixing the playful with the devastating, Harvey coasts on cathartic waves of emotion and monster hooks throughout Sweetness—a momentum which is guaranteed to push her to the front of the ranks of today’s most fearless rising indie-pop singer-songwriters.