Culture Cabinet

Avery Tucker didn’t set out to reinvent himself. He set out to reconnect. After nearly a decade in Girlpool, the deeply intertwined songwriting project he began as a teenager, Tucker found himself searching for something he couldn’t locate in collaboration anymore: clarity. Paw, out October 10th, his first solo album, is the result of that search. It’s a record shaped by disconnection, rebuilt with instinct, and delivered without pretense.

“I was always missing this really cohesive, locked-in feeling in my creative practice,” he says in an interview with Culture Cabinet. “So I thought, what if I just tried to create that intense feeling in my own work?”

That impulse came slowly but unmistakably. “We were so young,” Tucker says of Girlpool’s earliest days. “It was my first time collaborating in a way that felt radically honest, radically vulnerable. That was the fuel.”

In his early Girlpool days, Tucker found himself sharing everything (lyrically, emotionally, creatively) with his bandmate, Harmony Tividad. As Tucker recalls, the two often found themselves writing every word to every song together, and in doing so, the pair learned how to trust their voices as artists, which Tucker found “intoxicating from the beginning.” But as life and geography shifted, so did the process. “Our albums became more like, ‘I’m bringing my stuff, she’s bringing hers.’ We’d put some finalized paint on each other’s songs. It was cool, but different.”

Eventually, the space between what once was and what had become was too big to ignore. “I sort of had a dependent relationship, creatively,” he reflects. “The signs were clear in my body. I was craving more connectivity in the songwriting process. So I thought, why don’t I just give that to myself?”

When Girlpool disbanded in 2022, the path forward began to take shape. “It was really daunting, because Girlpool had been my career since I was 17. But maybe it’s not about going to find someone else or forcing something to work again. Maybe it’s about trusting myself,” Tucker says. 

Several songs on Paw, including “Malibu,” “Like I’m Young,” “Baby Broke,” and “My Life Isn’t Leaving You,” existed before the breakup. “I had a full record at one point,” he says. “But I ended up just storing those songs away and writing new ones.”

He describes the writing process in near-psychedelic terms, likening his writing process to creating his own worlds that exist within their own realms. Like creating tiny solar systems of personal chapters in the greater galaxy of his life. “When a collection of songs comes out of me in one season,” reflects Tucker, “whether it’s six months or two, they build a planet of my state. It’s like a blueprint, and then I’m living the actual thing. It feels kind of psychedelic.”

Despite the weight of this being his solo debut, Tucker doesn’t feel much pressure around its release. “I kind of am still like, ‘Yeah, this is my album,’” he says. “I haven’t had this ‘Aha’ moment. I’m already excited about my next batch of songs. I’m kind of more obsessed with that than processing this release.”

That drive carries into his live shows, including one that is set to occur on September 4 in New York City’s Nightclub 101. “It’s not technically a release show, because the album won’t be out yet,” he says of the upcoming show. “But, I’ll be playing a lot of the songs from the record. It’s really raw and intense. These songs carry so much deep feeling in me, and I’m excited to let them ring out into a new city.”

More than anything, Paw is an invitation to simply feel. “To put a song on an album, it has to move me,” Tucker says. “That’s the nectar I’m looking for. Maybe it’s nectar for other people, maybe not. But I’m just sharing what does it for me.”

Tucker doesn’t expect Paw to resonate with everyone, but he’s okay with that. In fact, he’s secure enough in his own artistry to know that “getting” it is not the point. “It’s really like an offering,” he says. “Pick this up, put it down. Take it with you, take it on a walk, put it in your car, put it in your ears when you’re flying. And put it down if it’s not for you.”

That surety can only reflect an artist that is confident in his own voice, and his ethereal approach to life. In talking to him, you get the sense that this is an artist who, despite having already been established in the music world for some time, is still just getting started. 

But for now, he’s happy to just be taking the ride, both literally and metaphorically. “It almost feels like writing a song that accomplishes the mission [of connecting with a listener] is like designing a train. A universal train. You can get in with all your friends and belongings and ride it wherever you’re supposed to go. But writing the song itself, that’s building the railway.”

Paw is out October 10. You can get tickets to Avery Tucker at Nightclub 101 here.