The LA-based, Dallas-raised neo-soul artist Liv.e has just released her second album Girl In The Half Pearl and a Dublin date has just been announced.
Foggy Notions are bringing Liv.e to The Workman’s Club on Wednesday May 24th, for her Irish debut.
Tickets from €20 from Ticketmaster on sale now.
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About Liv.e
LA-based, Dallas-raised artist Liv.e releases her second album Girl In The Half Pearl, via In Real Life. The album includes all three of Liv.e’s previously-released and critically-acclaimed singles “Ghost,” “Find Out,” co-produced with Mndsgn and “Wild Animals,” co-written and produced alongside John Carroll Kirby and Solomonphonic. Across Girl In The Half Pearl’s 17 tracks, Liv.e traverses the mental hurdles of self-examination, as she works through realizations prompted by grief and grapples with the dynamics of her role in the relationships in her life, which she detailed in a recent conversation with Rolling Stone.
Girl In The Half Pearl seizes on both the creative and personal liberation Liv.e has experienced in the time since her critically-acclaimed debut album Couldn’t Wait To Tell You…. Building upon the foundation she laid with CWTTY, Girl in the Half Pearl bares her process of growth, forgiveness and reclamation of her sense of womanhood across an immersive soundscape. The album’s artistic shifts developed during her time experimenting with live performance in London last year while under residency at London’s Laylow. Vinyl, cassette and CD physical copies of the album are now available for pre-order exclusively on Liv.e’s Bandcamp HERE.
The 25-year-old artist first garnered attention with her 2017 EP, FRANK, and 2018’s Hoopdreams EP. Over the past year, Liv.e shared the standalone Mndsgn-produced single “Bout It,” along with a COLORS performance and released CWTTY+, the deluxe version of her 2020 critically-acclaimed debut album. She’s since performed alongside Earl Sweatshirt and Ravyn Lenae. Liv.e’s unique sensibilities have also caught the eye of the fashion world, marked by an appearance in a Miu Miu ad campaign photographed by Tyrone Lebon. Most recently, she was featured on the new Mount Kimbie single titled “a deities encore” and played a special live set as part of Benji B’s Maida Vale 2022 special on BBC Radio 1.
Growing up in a family of musicians, contemporary neo-soul artist Olivia Williams, better known as Liv.e (pronounced Liv), spent most of her life trying not to get into music: “I really avoided making music for a long time because my family is so deep in it,” she joked. But when listening to the jazzy riffs, experimental production, and sprawling, expansive storytelling on her upcoming release Girl in the Half Pearl, it’s hard to imagine she ever considered being anything else.
The last couple of years especially, Liv.e’s been doing a lot: She’s performed alongside Earl Sweatshirt and Ravyn Lenae, appeared in a Miu Miu campaign photographed by Tyrone Lebon, and performed “Bout It”—a single produced by Mndsgn—on COLORS, to name a few. Precipitated by the cultural resonance of her critically-acclaimed 2020 debut, Couldn’t Wait to Tell You…, the opportunities—both in music and beyond—seem boundless.
More specifically, the 17-track work talks Liv.e’s transformation during the journey of a years-long unsound relationship that lasted through her early twenties: “I started seeing the reality of my relationships, recognizing how easily I could be used and manipulated. I was vulnerable to the wrong people, but I had to learn that the really fucking hard way,” Liv.e explains. “So I started slowly creeping into having these realizations, and I started writing a lot.”
After some time and distance from that experience, she sees the time as a period of growth, forgiveness, and reclamation. Both GIHP and recent shifts in her artistry—like her London residency at Laylow this April, where she explored avant-garde performances like scoring a film during her set—are proof of that. “I’m getting my power back—my sense of self and my sense of strength and trust within myself,” she says. “CWTTY was coming into my independence. Now, I’m coming more into my womanhood.”
