Pearl & The Oysters - Monkey Mind

For nearly a decade, Pearl & The Oysters have built their reverb-drenched, Tropicalia-tinged pop in private, piecing together lush little worlds from home studios in Gainesville and Los Angeles. Monkey Mind, their sixth album, breaks that pattern. Written and tracked in a matter of weeks in the wake of the 2025 Los Angeles fires and a second Trump inauguration, it is the sound of Juliette Pearl Davis and Joachim Polack turning restlessness into songs fast, before the feeling could curdle into something worse.

The title borrows the Buddhist term for a mind that leaps ceaselessly from thought to thought, and the duo lets that same eclecticism run through the record: palindromic lyrics, 70s piano rock, and their longstanding Tropicalia leanings all tangled together on the single "Doom Mood." For the first time, Pearl & The Oysters handed the reins to an outside producer, Jonathan Rado, known for his analog touch on records by Weyes Blood, Father John Misty, The Lemon Twigs, and Foxygen. Cutting straight to tape with minimal overdubs and a rotating cast of LA studio regulars, the sessions traded the duo's usual meticulous layering for something looser, warmer, and far more immediate.

The band has said they were responding to "a cultural climate plagued by digital alienation and generative AI slop," yet Monkey Mind rarely sounds like a record wrestling with dread. Its brightness is the point: the sunniest surfaces here were built specifically to hold something heavier underneath, a coping mechanism disguised as a pop record.

This LP pressing brings Pearl & The Oysters' most collaborative and unguarded album yet to vinyl, a document of two songwriters processing an anxious moment the fastest way they knew how: by playing through it together.