Pearly Drops

Out of Femme en Fourrure

Pearly Drops exists because something else stopped working. Juuso Malin had run the Helsinki band Femme en Fourrure from 2008 to 2018, and Sandra Tervonen joined it in 2013. By the end of that stretch neither of them could find a reason to keep writing under the old name, so they started again under a new one — not a clean break from the personnel, just from the frame around it.

The restart was modest. The first Pearly Drops songs appeared in 2019, and a debut album, Call for Help, followed in 2020, self-released. It found an audience through streaming playlists rather than press, which was not the plan; Tervonen has described the period simply as the point where something began to resonate and gave her a reason to write more songs.

The division of labour has stayed roughly fixed since. Tervonen handles composition, lyrics, vocals, production and the painted artwork. Malin handles composition, vocals, guitar and the mixing. Everything is made at their own Helsinki room, Studio Pearly Drops, and the styling, videos and press images are theirs as well — Tervonen has called the look at least half of the band rather than a layer applied afterwards.

Producers who happen to have a band

The career underneath the band matters to how the records sound. Both members work as writers and producers for other artists, with credits including ALMA, Nightwave and Inga Copeland, and they hold gold and platinum certifications for that outside work. They have also received the Teosto Prize, one of the more significant Finnish composition awards.

Malin has put the hierarchy plainly: they are producers first and foremost, even though they write and perform the songs at the same time. That reading explains a lot about the catalogue — arrangements that behave like production experiments rather than demos filled out later, and a willingness to let an instrumental passage run on past the point where a conventional pop structure would cut it short.

Recognition outside Finland arrived in 2024, when Pearly Drops were named among the nominees for the Music Moves Europe Awards, the European Union's prize for contemporary and popular music.

Three albums, each further out

Call for Help in 2020 established the register: synth-led, soft-edged, unhurried. The second album, A Little Disaster, arrived on 14 April 2023 through Cascine, a Los Angeles–based independent, and brought the duo their first sustained international coverage. A further release, Haunted Expansion Pack, followed on 10 November 2023.

The critical vocabulary around those records settled quickly — Glamcult characterised the Helsinki pair as putting eighties nostalgia through a kaleidoscope of wistful lyricism and modern satire, which is closer to accurate than most shorthand, because the satire is genuinely there and is usually aimed at the music industry the duo work inside.

Then the label changed. The third album came out on Music Website, a New York independent founded in 2023, rather than Cascine.

The Voices Are Coming Back

The third album was released on 29 August 2025: ten tracks, written and produced by the duo, mixed by Malin at their own studio, mastered by Joe LaPorta at Sterling Sound, with cover art painted by Tervonen. The running order moves from Delusional On Sunset Blvd through Ratgirl, Mermaid — which features Tim Nelson of the Australian band Cub Sport — Shallow, End Credits, Demonlover, Deep-fried, Pillow Face and Cocoon & Tatiana's Lament, before closing on Silver Lake Mystery Forest at six minutes and thirty-seven seconds.

The record was built around Los Angeles and around David Lynch. The duo have said outright that there would be no Pearly Drops as they know it without him, and Malin's description of making the album in the city was that it really felt like being inside Mulholland Drive. Tervonen has framed the place as a double bind — somewhere with the feeling of every possibility available, and the equal possibility of failing badly. The stated subject is what happens when a dream is chased too hard and fantasy and ambition start bleeding into a sense of identity; Hollywood functions as a symbol rather than a location.

Technically it is their most deliberate record. The Minimoog Model D and semi-modular synths do most of the heavy lifting, chosen because they force sounds to be built from nothing rather than recalled from presets, and acoustic guitar appears on a Pearly Drops album for the first time. The reference points they cite run from mid-2000s electroclash and new rave to The B-52's, Slowdive, Dario Argento's Suspiria and baroque pop. Narratives are left deliberately unfinished, which is the Lynch debt showing.

Reviews treated the production-first approach as the point rather than a flaw. Writing on 8 September 2025, mxdwn's Kelsey Wood called it an album that knows exactly what it wants to be and achieves it effortlessly because of its own confidence, noting the closing track carries roughly two minutes of vocal across more than six and a half minutes. Interview Magazine described the record as an adventure of fever-dream instrumentals and filtered vocals. Tervonen's own account of the method is narrower and more useful: looking for the place to put a little glitch that makes something ugly.

Autumn 2026: the long run

Speaking in an interview published on 6 December 2025, the duo laid out the touring plan built on the album — a European run opening on 27 February 2026 and a first headlining North American tour in the spring, with a Montreal date set for 1 April. At that point they had played the new songs live exactly once, in London, and were still working out how the material would behave on a stage.

What they are doing now is different work: the support slot on Slayyyter's WOR$T GIRL IN THE WORLD tour, alongside Kalika. That run took them through North America at the end of September 2026 — Roadrunner in Boston on 29 September, Théâtre Beanfield in Montreal on 30 September, Danforth Music Hall in Toronto on 1 October, Terminal 5 in Manhattan on 3 October and Brooklyn Paramount on 4 October.

The British leg follows at the end of October: Albert Hall in Manchester on 30 October, the O2 Institute in Birmingham on 31 October, the O2 Academy in Glasgow on 1 November, CHALK in Brighton on 3 November and the Roundhouse in Camden on 5 November. Wedged into the gap on 4 November is a show of their own at Strange Brew in Bristol, with MIAW opening — their first appearance in the city. Two European dates close the year, Le Botanique in Brussels on 17 November and the Zénith Paris La Villette on 18 November.

What translates

The interesting tension in the current touring is between the records and the rooms. The albums are patient and often quiet; the rooms on this run are large and belong to a headliner whose audience has come for something considerably more aggressive.

The duo seem aware of the problem and have decided in favour of the rooms. Malin has described their shows as something to be taken part in rather than listened to politely, reaching for the frenetic energy of Snow Strippers as the comparison. Tervonen, who describes herself as introverted, has said she gravitates towards the repetitive, trance-like songs in the set precisely because those are the ones that open a line to an audience. The songs, by their account, change substantially between the recorded version and the stage.