Last month LA-based, Paris-bred lounge pop duo Pearl & The Oysters – comprised of Juliette Pearl Davis (Juju) and Joachim Polack (Jojo) – released Monkey Mind, their sixth full-length and third for Stones Throw (also home to our phriend Sofie Royer). The album, easily one of the year’s best, continues the band’s musical traditions which often draw comparisons to Stereolab (whose Lætitia Sadier, also a phriend of PHILTHY, provides vocals on “Read the Room,” off of 2023 fourth LP Coast 2 Coast) and were recently characterized by FLOOD as both “retro-futurist jazz pop” and “space-age electronica.” However, every time we hear them, we can’t help but think of the earliest days of The Bird and the Bee (not that they didn’t fit those characterizations, as well), whose self-titled album is still currently in contention for the debut of the century…
Born in January of 2025, Monkey Mind’s biggest inspirations come from the duo’s current home of Los Angeles – which was being ravaged by wildfires at the same time Trump returned to office – and the Buddhist concept that provides the album’s title (“a restless, looping consciousness: thoughts jumping, spiraling and rarely settling.”) “We felt a need to tap into a certain urgency and honesty, as a result of our growing malaise with a cultural climate plagued by digital alienation and generative AI slop,” the duo has said of the album, which was written in just a few weeks and boasts a narrative of a 24-hour cycle of the mind. And although the thematic origins of the album may be bleak, the whimsical quirk of the sounds themselves (which they’ve also said owe a lot to the 1970s) provide quite an effective sonic relief from the current state of the world.
Pearl & The Oysters have made the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection a regular stop on recent tours, with a few shows at PhilaMOCA, a slot opening Franklin Music Hall for TV Girl, and a date just last September at Ortlieb’s. The band are currently amidst a jaunt behind Monkey Mind which will have them returning to the 215 this Sunday, July 26th, when they headline MilkBoy, which we strongly suspect will be one of the best shows of the summer. Following Monkey Mind’s release, the band performed a full-band private performance at Roland Warehouse and Creative Studio, which you can check out above (to get a feel for their live vibes), along with the official video for their most recent single, “Lights Out.”
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