Gal Pal - This and Other Gestures (2023) [Hi-Res]

The project of Emelia Austin (she/her), Shayna Hahn (she/her), and Nico Romero (he/him), Gal Pal was born out of a serendipitous meeting in college — same dorm, same floor, each member drawn to the other by shared ambition and a desire to play music in a space that felt non-judgemental and generative. Initial collaborations were improvisatory, long-winded, and playful in the truest sense. They worked with equipment recently bought, a drum kit no one yet knew how to play. “We were learning our instruments together,” says Romero. “The project started from wanting to learn how to play and write songs with other people.”

This they learned, and learned fast. Gal Pal recorded their debut album GIRLISH (2017) while still in college and then moved back to the Los Angeles area from which they all hail. They’ve performed near-ceaselessly since, opening for bands like Pile, Ian Sweet, Palehound, and Momma. The songs on GIRLISH and subsequent EP Unrest/Unfeeling (2019) were written as Gal Pal began — all three in a room, switching instruments spontaneously, trading riffs and rhythms until the sense of wonder emerged, eyes met, and something stuck. This energy is palpable in the music — songs expand over multiple movements, time signatures shift in a blink, and guitar riffs interlock as if dueling.

On This and Other Gestures, though, Gal Pal altered their process. Now all in their mid-twenties, Austin, Hahn, and Romero experimented for the first time with writing in isolation, crafting songs with words all their own before bringing them to the group. The result is a sprawling 14-track record that explores the friction of newly-minted adulthood through each of their individual experiences and sees the members of Gal Pal at the height of their personal and collective power.