Painting from a palette of neon nightmares and pastel colored daydreams, Pearly Drops’ Sandra Tervonen and Juuso Malin are creating a world of strange and softly smudged pop music. Their nostalgic soundscapes combine to create a sense of time and placelessness. A Little Disaster, their sophomore album, was released in April 2023. It follows their breakout LP, Call For Help.
A Little Disaster is otherworldly and ethereal, the vocals appearing as brushstrokes on a canvas of analogue frequencies - the production all shimmering synths and looming guitars. The band describes their sound as “a gloomy color wheel in a sci-fi dream.” Forever cheeky and slightly macabre, the Finnish duo continue, “We’re the unsettling surrealist piece in your favorite gallery, always trying to tap our storeroom of unconscious thoughts and channel them into the songwriting process. It’s also important that we leave room for imagination. We never want the message to be too literal or overshadow the end result.”
Several forces inspired the making of the album: an abundance of worrisome global events and the resulting feeling of being unarmed and weary in a world that’s apparently always on the brink of disaster, art-house indie flicks and horror movies, plus contemporary fashion and internet rabbit holes. An inescapable culture cocktail in our modern landscape, uniquely articulated through the lens of Pearly Drops. These themes are abundantly clear in singles “Kiss Away The Pearly Drops” and “Feed The Fire” where wistful chords serve as a bed for hushed lyrics about oblivion.
Serving as their own self-contained audiovisual continuum, the album and single covers were hand painted by singer/producer Sandra in the band’s Helsinki studio. “I started to associate more and more radiant pigments – luridness, even – with the album, as I felt like a sense of irresolution and anxiety was so prevalent across the songs. There was also a degree of cozy warmth and tenderness I wanted to embody.” Press pics, styling, visualizers and other aesthetic items are created by the band too. And while Pearly Drops is a new name to many, Sandra and Juuso are an accomplished double-act. Alongside their own productions, the label owners and artists have provided compositions to acts including ALMA, Nightwave and Inga Copeland. They’ve earned golden and platinum records for their work with others and have been awarded the Teosto Prize – one of the Nordic countries’ most prestigious symbols of recognition.
