Sex Week

In Sex Week’s debut album, Ears as an Organ of Touch, Pearl Amanda Dickson and Richard Orofino have cleared the channels between the senses, activating all of them at once. Tenderness, frustration, and clarity fuse together. Sound becomes tactile and visceral. True to the title, the pair’s record redefines auditory experience as a form of close bodily contact.

It was the act of listening that brought them together in the first place. Through a mutual friend, Richard heard Pearl’s playlists, and Pearl discovered Richard’s solo music. Their first meeting was a mutual confession: they had been listening to each other already.

In their early days, Richard showed Pearl, a newcomer to songwriting, how to make music the “right way.” She, in turn, showed him that rules exist to be broken. Together they drew blueprints, ripped them up, and discovered a uniquely intuitive approach. The band’s first two EPs, 2024’s Sex Week and 2025’s Upper Mezzanine, captured this glorious epiphany: you really can do whatever you want.

Sex Week quickly solidified their spot in the exciting underground of hotly-tipped NYC acts, and garnered attention from Mitski, which led to a support slot opening for her residency at the Shed. Additional tours alongside Fcukers, Acopia, and more, followed.

After back-to-back touring, the duo were completing final polishes on Ears as an Organ of Touch, only for the hard drive containing the nearly-completed album to crash. There were no backups. They sent the hard drive to a forensic recovery facility that supposedly the FBI uses. Richard became ill from the stress. “The wait was paralyzing.” Richard says. The two performed egg cleanses to rid them of a potential evil eye. “It felt like we had to let the album go, in order for us to be able to have it again. If it was all lost, then maybe it wasn’t meant to be heard.” After six weeks, the hard drive returned to them, fully recovered.

Ears as an Organ of Touch, written and recorded in their first year living together in their Brooklyn apartment, captures the pair as they swing between states of total collapse and total connection. This seemingly chaotic back and forth is purposeful: “It feels like our life,” says Richard. That intensity is shirked with the title track “Ears as an Organ of Touch”, as the two playfully tease each other in an infectious 2000’s pop homage. Each song is a dialogue, whether with one another, or a higher power: be that higher power, a form of surveillance, like in “Big Brother “and “Collateral,” or a spiritual figure, like in “American Pope.”

Wooden flutes and hand drums float throughout the record, integrating natural sounds into otherwise electronic forward tracks. The album’s opening track, “Life is a Circle,” is a seemingly straight-forward folk song layered with quantized horse gallops. For other tracks, they use an antique metal dining plate in place of a snare drum, which became such a staple that it’s now incorporated into their live set. In “Baby, Baby” a soft marimba is halted by a loud gunshot and replaced with sparkling arpeggiated synths.

Sharing an uncompromising, maximalist vision for their record, the duo go to great lengths to film and edit their videos themselves. “Life is a Circle” had them flying to Utah, driving hours to different landscapes, and camping in their rental car to stay on budget. “If it’s not 100% all the time, it doesn’t feel like we are doing enough. The art is every aspect. The music, the visuals, the stage presence.”

Sex Week shines in the intimacy Pearl and Richard have with one another, and their willingness to show both the purity and ugliness of that intimacy. “Being in a relationship you are confronted with all your less than admirable personality traits, and through those lows you see one another and make a mutual decision to keep going. It felt important to us to have an album that reflected all those experiences.” Pearl says. In pursuit of their own transparency, Pearl and Richard construct a distinct language and home of their own. Ears as an Organ of Touch plants itself firmly in the fog between their inner and outer worlds, as the pair find a way to simultaneously soothe and provoke, dance and resist, touch and feel.