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.
But true to the record’s “know thyself” thesis, Liv.e tackles the bulk of the production solo, rediscovering herself through electronica and noise, and dousing her R&B foundations in a stunning coat of fresh paint. The most satisfying moments push her to undertake fearsome experiments with her voice. She crashes into the breakbeats of “Ghost” with a metallic howl, roaring with frustration as she bitterly acknowledges her need for security—and recalls how it was denied to her in the past. “I know I said I don’t need the help/Just wanna get back home,” she cries, and the syllables begin to catch in her throat before suddenly vanishing, swallowed by grief. On “Clowns,” Liv.e lures you into the tense moment before the emotional dam between two people bursts. At the breaking point, teasing percussion and sickly sweet strings erupt into gory pyrotechnics. “Can’t be clowns for this long, so baby what do we make it?” she screams, her words sparking against the blown-out crash of the drums.
For years, Liv.e has found a home among some of Black music’s most critically lauded experimentalists like Earl Sweatshirt, Pink Siifu, and Black Noi$e. If you come to Girl in the Half Pearl looking to find a soothing voice in the wilderness, you will instead find a complex maze of battered beats and warped shouts. The gripping soundscape doesn’t allow you to watch its protagonist’s transformation from the safety of the back row—it shoves you through the screen. If Liv.e’s going to “break the mirror 90 times” because she can’t stand to see herself, you’re going to help her sweep up the glass.
When Liv.e announced Girl in the Half Pearl, she described it as a send-off for “people pleasing” behavior, and the album succeeds precisely because it feels so authentic and uncompromising: designed to serve only the needs of its creator. In burying the tender apology of “Snowing!” under a blanket of static, in applying a different vocal style and post-production technique to each vocal line of “Six Weeks,” in refusing to condense the long struggle of finding yourself into a catchy chorus, Liv.e affects an irresistibly magnetic anti-charm. She leads by example, by meeting herself in the present and holding her own gaze. Girl in the Half Pearl doesn’t fixate on the light at the end of the tunnel. It chisels into the rock slowly, humming along to the sound of each strike.
