Sex Week

Sex Week wouldn’t exist if not for a mixtape.

A few years back, actor & musician Pearl Amanda Dickson made a playlist called Colorado 2 Omaha for a friend about to drive across the country to NYC. It stuck around after the journey and soundtracked countless nights in her friend’s apartment, so much so that the friend’s roommate, songwriter Richard Orofino, would become obsessed with it. And with its creator.

After a visit to New York, the pair immediately clicked and Sex Week was born.

“Most of the artists on there – Liz Phair, Elusin, Walter Egan, Wolf Alice – we connected over,” says Dickson. “Then Richard returned the favor and showed me Judee Sill and Double Virgo.”

If those references don’t make it clear, there’s a sort of omnivorous quality to the music Sex Week loves & creates across their eponymous debut EP (out August 30th via Grand Jury Music).

“With some of our songs, I want people to giggle and sing along, and with the others I want them to cry and scream,” says Dickson.

Sex Week manages to illicit those laughs and tears in equal measure here – giggles from the cat meow voice memos on “Toad Mode” or the harpsichord that interjects on the ramshackle body image rumination “Naked,” and cries from the midnight pop of “Angel Blessings” or unsettling alien plod of the Duster-flecked “Kid Muscle.”

“‘Kid Muscle’ just feels like it’s a song from another planet to me,” says Orofino. “It’s a slowcore thing with Pearl whisper screaming and growling.” Pairing Dickson’s vocal ingenuity with Orofino’s production is the secret alchemy at the core of the music that composes EP.

“I think we have very different approaches to writing which really works in our favor,” says Orofino. “I come from a more proper musical background so chords, production, and instrumentation come naturally to me while Pearl is a writer. Her lyrical concepts are so unique and I obsess over her melodies.”

That melody takes centerstage on the moody centerpiece of the EP, “Cockpit,” a bewitching ballad with an eerie stillness that features the duo trading off vocals recorded on their apartment floor, a midnight duet that feels like it could stretch on forever.

Pressed to explain what they’re really chasing with the project, ultimately Sex Week says it’s that intimacy invoked by the great duets & duos of the past: Stevie Nicks and Don Henley, Sonny and Cher, David Lynch and Laura Dern.

That last non-musical pair might feel like a curveball, if not for the cinematic quality of the project. The music video for “Angel Blessings” feels like a fever dream pulled straight from Inland Empire, and “Cockpit” could soundtrack Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow. Which is no surprise because Dickson & Orofino are proper polymaths, who also direct videos for themselves and their Brooklyn friends in Babehoven, Bloomsday & Palehound.

Orofino cites Ryuichi Sakamoto as a major inspiration: “To be a part of an incredible band, have a complex array of musical journeys outside of pop, score film, live experimentally and spiritually,” says Orofino. “That’s the dream.”

Meanwhile, Dickson cites the everyman Johnny Cash as her inspiration. “There’s something so inspiring about him to me. His ability to convey emotions and stories, not to mention making songs his own. He’s one of my idols in his legacy and how his songs resonate and how he gave back. They’re timeless, and so is he.”

The intersection between those two distinctly different figures, a place where carefully constructed compositions still feel humble and lived in, is exactly where Sex Week resides. And from there, the Brooklyn duo will be unveiling their own mixtape to bewitch listeners all over the world.