Couldn’t Wait to Tell You, Liv.e’s debut LP, flipped through the pages of her diary quickly enough to animate her scattered musings on young romance while preserving each entry’s distinct perspective. Its allure rested on Liv.e’s charismatic storytelling, in her belief that “everybody got a love story” and her ability to play every role in those tales herself. Aggressively non-linear and rich in lo-fi charm, Couldn’t Wait to Tell You kept the proceedings light and easy. Even in the album’s darkest moments, Liv.e never felt more than 30 seconds away from a cathartic breakthrough, rescued by a tempo shift, a false ending, or the affirming words of a guest feature. She tore through dreamy realizations like outfits ripped off a garment rack, theorizing that a change of heart could be as easy as a change of costume.
Girl in the Half Pearl cuts to the scene after the diary slams shut, when your face crashes into the pillow before a long and sleepless night. In place of Couldn’t Wait to Tell You’s rose-tinted psychedelia, Liv.e builds a mirror, surgically examining the ugliest parts of her subconscious and clawing toward her worst impulses and most frightening thoughts. Healing is a minefield of doubt and confusion, crossed only by necessity. Liv.e doesn’t waste time idealizing the process. “When I looked inside my brain, there were all these webs of pain,” she groans on opener “Gardetto.,” somersaulting over a wave of pitch-shifted oh nos. She strains like a petulant child, burnt out before the work even begins: “I just wanna play with my toys/I’m too young for the world’s big problems.” Girl in the Half Pearl delves into the rich tension between deciding to change and taking the first step, dwelling in both the pain and promise of learning things about yourself that you sometimes wish you could forget. It’s a mesmerizing documentation of Liv.e’s ongoing rebirth that dares you to keep your eyes open during the scary parts.
Liv.e heads a formidable ensemble of producers in soundtracking Girl in the Half Pearl’s compounding existential crises, eliciting career-high performances from accomplices new and old. Frequent Remi Wolf collaborator Solomonophonic and West Coast new age keyboardist John Carroll Kirby pull out all the stops for the fluorescent “Wild Animals,” wrapping its knowing eye roll to conniving men in trickling piano and the evergreen warmth of a brushed drum backbeat. Ever-reliable L.A. lysergist Mndsgn carves out a sizable chunk of real estate across the record, but lends a particularly inspired hand to “Find Out.” He digs deep in the crates, unearthing a jazzy, snare-less loop that thumps like an aching heartbeat, giving Liv.e’s decision to trade love’s rollercoaster for “precious time alone” the perfect dose of last-kiss sweetness. She walks away, a trilling synthesizer swirls in the mix, and the gut-wrenching resolve of her parting words (“I guess we’ll find out…the hard way”) cuts like a knife.
