Los Angeles band Gal Pal have announced their new album This and Other Gestures (out June 2nd) and shared the lead single “Angel in the Flesh,” a harmony and feedback-laced banger about the freedom that comes with letting yourself love. The album is their first in 6 years, and finds the trio of Emelia Austin (she/her), Shayna Hahn (she/her) and Nico Romero (he/him) in their mid-twenties and at the height of their personal and collective power, working through gender dysphoria, personal loss, and the confusion of young adulthood. “These songs are about us processing change. Is it good, is it bad? We’re grieving, we’re celebrating” reflects Austin.

Watch the Ashley Kron-directed video below, which finds the band playing a dysfunctional family that forgets their dog’s birthday. On the single, Romero explains, “I grew up listening to a lot of pop punk and emo bands. I was a big fan of labels like Fueled By Ramen and Decaydance as a kid. I think this song definitely comes from that background a bit. It’s easy for me to want to sing about crushes and longing because it’s a fun feeling to indulge in and romanticize, even when it hurts.”

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.

While no two people have the same experience in their 20’s, it’s almost universally true that these years feel like a powder-keg of transformational material. It’s this lustrous and, at times, uneasy sense of metamorphosis that Gal Pal captures with such specificity on Gestures. “These songs are very personal to us,” reflects Austin. “We’re telling stories about different things — life, death, love, grief — all these things we’re going through and growing out of. These songs are about us processing change. Is it good, is it bad? We’re grieving, we’re celebrating.”

The duality of grief and celebration that permeates the record is at its core the nature of change. Stepping into a new version requires saying goodbye to a past one, and each member of Gal Pal has experienced this simultaneously painful and euphoric tearing-in-two over the past few years. We bear witness to the grief of Romero’s gender dysphoria alongside the fresh and emergent joy of his transition. We hear Hahn’s searing pain over losing a friend, alongside her reckonings with the importance of community care. We encounter Austin’s dissonance at realizing she’s let the wrong relationships shape her identity, alongside the reminder that self-acceptance is within reach. These are their hard-earned lessons and Gestures is the gift of their struggles — an encapsulation of the resilience that’s molding their future selves.

Check out the pre-album single & video “Mirror” and catch the band on May 13th at Permanent Roadhouse Records in Los Angeles.

Photo Courtesy: Ry Essi