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Photography Nico DanielsJuly 24, 2026Music / Dazed Day OutMusic / Dazed Day OutA day out with Harmony Tividad, indie rock’s playful provocateur

Following the release of her new album Lifetime, the Los Angeles-bred artist talks about her perfume obsession, processing reality with her guitar and living freely

ShareLink copied ✔️July 24, 2026July 24, 2026Text Isabel Bekele

If there’s anyone who knows how to romanticise Los Angeles, it’s Harmony Tividad. “Any emotional agony I feel must be [processed with] music blasting and a cigarette on Mulholland Drive,” the singer-songwriter tells me on a sticky July afternoon in New York. “That is my therapy, I fear.” We’re in a park on the Lower East Side, with no cliffside roads in sight, making the act of whipping down the legendary highway sound like that much more of a fantasy.

To Tividad’s listeners, though, it’s not a hard image to conjure. On “Mulholland Drive”, one of the standout tracks on her sophomore record Lifetime, the Los Angeles native unpacks the perils of an unravelling relationship, traversing the iconic city all the while wondering: “Is this true love or a disaster? Watching true crime to kill my master/ Everything’s horrifying off Mulholland Drive”. It’s the sort of raw processing that creeps in again and again on Lifetime. Over 12 guitar-heavy indie pop songs, the 29-year-old muses on her fleeting youth, an old flame she can’t seem to shake and toxic beauty standards. Hollywood’s dark glamour is evoked once again on ballads like “Pantominer”, where the artist sings of lonely pretty girls and sleeping crowds in Laurel Canyon.

Photography Nico Daniels

When I first encounter Tividad, the deep canyons of Los Angeles have been traded in for the grey sidewalks of SoHo, New York. The crowded one we’ve agreed to meet on is in front of Scent Bar, a speciality fragrance store on Elizabeth Street. It’s a relentlessly sweaty day, easily one of the hottest of the summer so far, and Tividad arrives in a peach slip dress, pigtail braids, and white knee-high socks that, miraculously, never budge. Tividad, I quickly learn, is a major perfume nerd. Though the store is hardly bigger than a deli counter, we spend nearly an hour inside, pouring over dozens of glass bottles she knows a shocking amount about. She educates me on what scents she thinks I’d like, her favourite notes, and the origin of her perfume obsession: the ex-boyfriend who introduced her to this spot in the first place. Though the relationship ended, Tividad’s infatuation with perfume, now manifested through frequent visits to Scent Bar and scrolling on #PerfumeTok, is still kicking. “It’s the last accessory,” she says.

Though I’m catching up with Tividad during a time when new listeners are flocking, the musician is hardly new to the scene. Early fans, myself included, first knew her as half of Girlpool, the indie rock band she formed with friend Avery Tucker in 2013. As we walk further downtown, iced matchas in hand, Tividad recounts the band’s stint in Philadelphia, when she and Tucker were just teens playing DIY shows and collaborating with fellow indie acts like Waxahatchee. Tividad’s first solo record following Girlpool was the experimental, hyperpop-leaning album Gossip, the result of Tividad’s desire to leave her comfort zone. “I was really hesitant to continue making indie rock music just because I had done it for so long,” Tividad recalls. “I was literally born into the world of adulthood making indie rock music.”

Photography Hamish McCallion

With elements of both her newer solo outputs and her earlier Girlpool works shining through, Lifetime reads like a testament to where Tividad has been and where she’s going. While it’s Tividad at her most evolved, the record still has indie-rock’s fingerprints all over it, and came to be through the same mechanism as all of her music. “No matter what I’m putting out into the world, I’m always going to be writing on my guitar,” Tividad tells me back in the park, our matchas now well-drained. “It’s just how I process reality and how I continue to function in the world, because it really is what allows me to act like a somewhat normal person.”

Even without her guitar, Harmony, wide-eyed and observant, is constantly processing through writing. Sometimes that’s on Instagram, where she regularly shares affirmations, but more often, it’s in her Notes app, which she whips out under the rare patch of shade we’ve managed to find to read me some quotes. Ultimately, all of this comes out in her lyrics – on tracks like “In the Light of the Sun”, which includes her favourite line: “Every day I grow up again / at the times when I wish it’d end / and I don’t wanna save or spend / I just wanna be young again.”

Photography Nico Daniels

Though she sings about wanting to be young again, anyone who spends the day with Tividad can see her sense of play is well intact. By the afternoon’s end, we’ve visited a skatepark, swung on creaking swings, and, defeated by the heat at last, sprint through sprinklers fully clothed. The whole day has an air of playing hooky to it – maybe it’s the summer, or maybe it’s just Tividad’s contagious energy. “I have a really strong urge to wander and live in an inhibited way,” she says. “It can feel like a shameful thing to do, but I think it’s beautiful to live freely.”

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