Atlanta-based artist girlpuppy, the moniker for Becca Harvey, introduced themselves with their acclaimed 2022 debut When I’m Alone, for which Harvey cited a variety of influences from the Twilight books to Grizzly Bear. Three years later, Harvey returns with Sweetness, a striking artistic statement which demonstrates a marked development in both Girlpuppy’s deft and universally felt lyricism anchored by post-break-up reflections and the dynamic production employed throughout these ten captivating tracks. Experimenting with atmospheric synth instrumentals, gritty guitar tones and breezy country ballads, Sweetness manages to successfully blend a number of sonic palettes into one cohesive portrait of a young woman announcing her autonomy.

Once drawing comparison to Phoebe Bridgers, Sweetness heralds a range of eras and artists from Mitski to Elliot Smith. Each track abounds with infectious melodies and hooks delivered with a warm grace from Harvey’s engaging and understated performance.

Over Zoom, Becca Harvey spoke to Northern Transmissions about taking control in the studio during the making of girlpuppy’s dynamic and texturally rich second record, shares the stories behind the supporting music videos for the LP and what songs she feels perfectly capture her spirit and life.

NT: I’ve been really enjoying Sweetness! You said in the press materials that you felt that the actual record making process would be as important as the finished product. You also spoke about having more of a desire to be in the driver’s seat with these melodies and in the production decisions because you felt as though you deferred to collaborators ideas while making the debut Girlpuppy record. How do you feel that this new album has changed you as an artist and person?

Becca Harvey: It definitely has made me trust myself a little bit more and trust my instincts. It’s definitely made me realize that I can trust myself and I don’t need to always defer to another opinion of a man in a room and that I can just be me and that I have good taste and I can decide what’s good without someone else’s opinion!

NT: Was there a particular day in the studio or a song that was crucial in reaching that breakthrough moment for you where your confidence in your artistry grew and you felt invigorated by the process?

Becca Harvey: The very first song I wrote for the record was “For You Two” and when I showed that to Tom [Sinclair] and Holden [Fincher], who are the sweetest boys that played all over this record, they’re two of my close friends in Atlanta and are very good musicians over here, but when I wrote that whole song and showed it to them, and when we finished it in studio, it sounded exactly how I wanted it to.

That was when I was like, ‘Okay, wait, I can do this’. Not only that, but going to the Drop of Sun studios, where I made the whole record for the first time by myself and then making a song was really huge for me because I never thought in a million years that I could do that; go to the studio by myself and it just be me and Alex [Farrar] and an engineer and we’d get something done. When that first happened with “I Just Do”, that was the first song that it happened with, it was really, really inspiring and felt really good.

NT: If album one gave you the impetus to be more authoritative in the studio, how would you say that Sweetness has informed the way you’ll enter the process to make album three?

Becca Harvey: I like the idea of leaning more into those, the heavier shoegazier moments that are on Sweetness.Something that I have, which might be more unique compared to other artists, is that I have a very, very soft and quiet voice, I can’t really project my voice very well. I’ve tried to practice, but it just doesn’t come naturally to me and so I actually really like how my voice sounds against harsh and loud, heavy guitars. I think for the next record, I’d like to lean into that more.

Also, I had a bit more of my friends playing on this record. I always forget that I have a lot of very talented friends who are musicians that I can ask to help me and throw down a guitar riff. I’m going to try to do that more, as well.

NT: Nice. On the topic of having a lot of talented friends, you’ve collaborated with so many great musicians such as Dimitri Giannopoulos, The War on Drugs’ Dave Hartley, Beach Fossils’s Tommy Davidson. You’ve also worked with Marshall Vore. What have been some of the things that you’ve picked-up and implemented in your own artistic practice from collaboration?

Becca Harvey: It’s definitely helped so much. I think I credit a lot of my songwriting, or gathered some tips on songwriting from when I made my very first EP Swan, with Marshall. Marshall is such an amazing lyricist and I learned that I can be silly in songs from him. It can still sound serious and be serious, but you can throw in some little silly things here and there. I’m a huge Father John Misty fan, so I think that’s also something I got from his music. But I saw that I could do it in real time with Marshall.

With Alex, he just has such an incredible ear for sneaky little jewels of sounds in music. I had never really seen anything like how he works before. He has the greatest ideas, especially when it comes to writing synth melodies. In my first record, there’s a little bit of synth, but it’s never my first instrument to go to but Alex is so good at picking out those sounds. He’s also just such a good listener and I feel like I just learned so much from him about being a good listener and being patient. He’s just so good at what he does. He’s such an amazing producer and he made me feel so comfortable and so confident in the studio. He brought out so much confidence in me that I had never really felt in the studio before.

I definitely learned where to put little sparks of sound and I definitely learned a lot more about instruments because I don’t know a whole lot about instruments!

NT: That’s so funny because that’s something I loved about the album; how varied the instrumentation across the album is. Sonically, it’s ambitious and is successful in how you stitch together all of your ideas. What were some of the textural elements or melodic structures that you were most excited to experiment with?

Becca Harvey: It was so much fun to make Sweetness. I’m always a sucker for a good bridge. I love to have a bridge in my songs but I also tried to explore not having one and having different song structure because when I write, I like to count the syllables and the verses as I’m doing them, it’s literally like I’m doing poetry, and Alex was like, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before!’. It was really funny because I always thought that was normal because I don’t write lyrics with anybody else. It was the same with this record, every lyric was written by me in my specific little syllable order. But, I was trying to get out of that mode a little bit.

Usually, as well, I’ll start a song with a verse-verse-chorus-verse-bridge structure and be done. With “Champ”, for example, that starts with the chorus. I had never done anything like that before. There was a Slow Pulp song that I had been listening to that started with the chorus and I thought that was really unique and interesting. I had never tried it before, so I was like, ‘Let me see if I can do that!’. That’s how we did it with “Champ.”

“I Was Her Too” and “I Think I Did”, those are the two most different and unique songs on the record. Those two were also the hardest for me and Alex to get to because I had “I Was Her Too” completely done as an acapella voice memo. I showed it to Alex and tried to explain that I wanted it to have an Elliot Smith or have a ‘90s guitar sound, which is not how the song ended-up being, but Alex had these ideas for it that I couldn’t even understand. Then for “I Think I Did”, Tom and I started working on that demo a couple years ago, and it sounded like a Beatles song, it was literally just a Beatles song. Alex was like, ‘This is so funny because you and Tom love the Beatles so much and you can tell! Do you want it to still be a Beatles song? Do you want to change it for the record?’. And I actually did want to change it up and we got to work. The way that Alex described it, he was like, ‘I want each word to sound like it’s bouncing off of a lily pad’. He tried to explain it to me but I was really not following so I just threw down vocals and saw what came next. I tracked the vocals, singing the same melody that was in the demo, and then Alex was like, ‘Ok, let me work on this and I’ll send it to you later.’ When I got the mixes back, a few weeks later, that was my first time hearing “I Think I Did” in its entirety. It was crazy to hear because it sounded so unique. He executed that song so perfectly. I’m so glad that I trusted him.

NT: Cool! Another moment on the record that provided one of the many unexpected twists and turns was “Beaches” which hears you pivot to country music. Sometimes when artists try to include lots of different styles in one album it can be jarring, but it works really well on Sweetness. Tell me about making that song and why you wanted to have that country sensibility on the album.

Becca Harvey: I’m from the South, so I’m surrounded by that type of music anyways and I love it. I love pedal steel, it’s such a beautiful sound to me. I know that Alex is really good at making music like that. “Beaches’ kind of never changed from the moment I wrote it to how it appears on the record. It sounds pretty much the same as it did on the first demo that I made of it with Tom and Holden. It got a little bit more honky-tonky in the studio, which is what I wanted. When we made the demo, it was just Holden playing slide guitar but I really wanted it to be full pedal steel. When I was on tour with Hovvdy back in 2023, I met Bennett Littlejohn, who was playing pedal steel for Hovvdy. He lives in Asheville, where we made the record, so it was really convenient because I was like, ‘I know the perfect guy that can get in the studio and do this’ and he brought so much life to it. I love that song. I think it’s fun to have a little Southern moment on the record!

NT: Lyrically, you talk in the press materials about how this record was inspired by you grieving a 4-year relationship. Throughout the songs, you sing so frankly about that experience. How do you find that moment when your lyrics go from being completely private and exist only to you and your notebook to the point where you have to share them with people in the studio or friends and family?

Becca Harvey: I guess like for me, the minute I write it down, I’m like, ‘OK, I’m now disassociating from that experience and version of me. That’s not really me anymore. It’s out of my hands. It’s pen to paper and it’s not really about me anymore.’ I got really lucky just in terms of the amount of time between writing these songs and now releasing them, even getting into the studio, there was a good chunk of time to grieve the relationship properly.

I was writing songs for this record probably the day after the break-up. I was ready! I think I would feel differently if I had released them within the same year or even the same month of it happening. Now, with the amount of time that I’ve had between, I’ve completely dissociated from these lyrics and I just read them from a completely different perspective now. And it’s fun. I’ve been having such a funny experience with, I’ve been listening to the record a lot with my partner, because my partner made a music video for me and they helped a lot with the sequencing of the record when I was picking what order it should go in, and it’s been such a funny experience because I listen to the songs now and there’s some that I’m like, ‘Oh my God, they’re so dramatic. What was I going through?’. Obviously, I know what I was going through and it was a lot, but it’s funny because I’m coming at it from such a different perspective now. I don’t feel the sadness of the record anymore only in the way that I feel bad for the girl that I’m listening to that wrote these songs.

NT: I always think it’s such an incredible thing for songwriters to be able to have that experience and to be able to confront challenging experiences and emotions. It’s not easy to be so brutally honest with yourself about certain things that have happened so soon after living through them.

Becca Harvey: Yes, and it’s like, ‘Whoa, that was weird!’. I’m a Pisces, so I think I’m also very honest about everything. Everything in these songs is everything I’ve already told my friends or a stranger at a bar. I’m not a very closed-off person, I’ve been trying recently to keep some things to myself. I’m getting older and I’m in a very stable, long-term relationship now so I need to try to have some privacy or some personal things that are just for me. But I struggle with that, I always have.

We’ve been playing some of these songs live, we’ve been playing “Windows” and “For You Two” live for the past two years. Every now and then I’ll be singing them, and I remember in Paris we were sound checking and I was doing “For You Two” and I walked off the stage after soundcheck and just sobbed because everything from that experience came flooding back to me. Every now and then, there’s a moment where I’m like, ‘Wow, I wrote that and that did happen’ but mostly it’s fine.

NT: You mentioned music videos earlier. I had a lot of fun watching them all for this record. You clearly drew a lot of inspiration from cinema with the imagery and narrative language in each of them. You pay homage to ‘80s vampire movies, David Lynch, boxing, and one also feels like a live action Brothers Grimm adaptation. Tell me about developing the videos for Sweetness, it looked like they were fun to make.

Becca Harvey: For all four of those, the only song, when writing, I had an immediate music video idea for was “Champ”. I thought, well, boxing! It’s right there, I can do that. I had the idea for a while and I got to have all my friends in it. My partner is in it and it was so much fun doing that video. I also got a really good workout from that video. I didn’t know that it was going to be that intense and actually I got punched in the face by my friend a few times. When she would do the fake punch, she would accidentally punch me and conveniently she didn’t get hit once. It was literally only me! We need to work that out; me and my girl. But, yeah, that video was so fun. We got to make that in New York, which I had never done before so that was super cool.

Then, with “I Just Do” and “Windows”, “Windows” is my favorite music video that I’ve ever made. It was crazy because with both of those videos, we had a tight two day turnaround. We had to do the entire video on New Year’s Eve and we just did the whole thing in a day. We were on such a small time crunch, but we made it all in the same room, all at the same time and they were just really prepared. I loved all the ideas that Trent [Wayne] masterminded. He had the idea of all the trinkets on the table and going into the woods. That was a really great experience and I had so much fun. I love the simplicity of that video and how pretty it looks. It just looks pretty and that’s how the song feels to me. “

I Just Do” was fun because I’ve never worked with that many people in a music video before. We shot it at my friend’s house, that’s just her house. That’s how it’s decorated, we didn’t have to decorate it. A lot of people thought that was a set decoration, but no, that’s just her house. She made it so easy for us to film there because she lives in an ‘80s movie set and she styled everyone, too! There were so many times that day when someone would walk out of her room to show us what they were wearing and I’d be like, ‘Oh, I need it. Can I have it? I want that. I want that!’.

I was trying to go home with everything. I actually did end up going home with the shoes I wear in the video, she did let me keep the shoes. That was a blessing. That was so much fun because I love everything vampire related. I’m a huge Twilight fan so getting to be a vampire really meant everything to me. It’s funny, though, because I didn’t even mean to do the Laura Palmer hair for that video. I didn’t realize I had her exact hairstyle until afterwards. So I was like, ‘Oh my God, I was literally Laura Palmer as a vampire,’ which I mean, that’s that’s the dream! That’s everything I’ve ever wanted. That was also a quick turnaround, I think we had like four or five days between shooting it to turn it in.

Then with the “Since April” video, my partner is an actor and knows a lot about films and he’s always wanted to direct. We talked about making a music video together. We made it in New York in this old gallery space. We’ve been watching a lot of David Lynch’s work for the past like year, or so. The first day of shooting that music video was the day that David Lynch died, which was crazy. We were out in the country filming the snow scenes and right before we went out and got the first shot, we saw the news and it was just devastating. My partner and I were both just like, ‘Ok, well, this just inspires us to make art even more. What David would want is for us to keep making art!’. I loved playing the three different people, that was really all the wigs! All the music videos, I’m very proud of them and they all feel very, like you said, like you can see the cinematic inspirations.

NT: Finally, you’ve spoken about “I Was Her Too” and you said that the person who inspired that song had sent you “The Whole of The Moon” by The Waterboys because they thought about you when they heard it but you didn’t understand why it reminded them of you. So, if you were to pick a song that you think actually reflects who you are or that you feel particularly connected to, what would it be? What song would you send to some to be like, ‘This is me in song form’?

Becca Harvey: You know, it’s so funny because I have a playlist of songs that I think were specifically written about me! Off the top of my head, the one that I listened to that I was truly like, ‘Oh my God, this is my life’ was “Look At Me Now” by Caroline Polachek. I’m going to have a look at this playlist now because I want to see what else I have in there. The playlist is called “Songs I Think Were Written Specifically About Me”. Ok, we have “Norman Fucking Rockwell” by Lana Del Rey, “Look At Me Now” by Caroline Polachek, “Silver Springs” by Fleetwood Mac, which is also referenced in the record, and then “Rider in the Dark” by Lorde. We’ve got “Keep You Down” by Christian Lee Hutson and then “Pink Balloon” by Samia, “Anything” by Adrianne Lenker, “Christine” by Snail Mail and “I Could Say” by Lily Allen! That’s my list!

Order Sweetness by girlpuppy HERE