Sex Week is the Brooklyn duo made up of Richard Orofino and Pearl Amanda Dickson, who released their first single ‘Toad Mode’ last fall, just months after they started making music together. The pair connected after Dickson made a playlist for her friend Allison to accompany her on a cross-country drive, which Allison kept playing when she returned home to the apartment she shared with Orofino. When they met, Dickson – an actress who has appeared in TV shows including Yellowjackets and The Girl From Plainview – was already a fan of Orofino’s music, which he’d been putting out on Bandcamp for several years. New songs came together naturally whenever they could spend time on them, whether over FaceTime or in person, culminating in the duo’s self-titled EP, out tomorrow on Grand Jury.
The project’s visual inspirations, particularly the films of David Lynch and David Cronenberg, ooze out of Sex Week as strongly as its musical reference points (some of which can be traced back to that mixtape), from Wolf Alice and Judee Sill to Stevie Nicks and Don Henley. Even if you’re not familiar with either member’s prior work, you might have caught the music videos they’ve directed for New York artists we’ve featured in the past year – or seen Dickson on the cover of Katy Kirby’s Blue Raspberry. But in their own songs and videos, Sex Week already exude a unique energy: gnarly, messy, dark, even animalistic in some of their aesthetic and lyrical choices, but always bound together by intense vulnerability, beautiful melodies, and delicately intertwining vocals. It’s the sort of intimacy that can put an outsider in a slight state of discomfort, but even at its most extreme – whether it’s their take on love or indie rock we’re talking about – Sex Week pulls you in and hits eerily close to home.
We caught up with Sex Week for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about the origins of the band, their collaborative process, filming music videos, and more.
What brought you together was a mixtape that Pearl made for her friend Allison, who happened to be Richard’s roommate. I know it was called “colorado 2 omaha,” but do you remember what was on it?
Pearl Amanda Dickson: I think the playlist was probably like 6 hours long or something, because that was about how long the drive was for her from Colorado to Omaha. There were a bunch of tracks on it.
Richard Orofino: I feel like the big ones for me were ‘Magnet and Steel’ by Walter Egan, which is in Boogie Nights in a really great scene.
PAD: That’s so true, that’s funny.
RO: I didn’t remember it, but then when I recently re-watched it, I was like, “Oh my god, it’s that song!’ And then there was ‘Shane’ by Liz Phair. That was the one where I thought, “What is this? This is the coolest song ever.” You really were my introduction to Liz Phair, and the early Liz Phair stuff is so good.
PAD: That’s crazy. I think it also had HIM, ‘When Love and Death Embrace.’
RO: That song is so good.
PAD: I feel like that playlist was just from a time in my life where I was listening to so much good music. It’s just all over the place.
RO: Wolf Alice, Baxter Dury.
PAD: Yeah, Baxter Dury, I had a little obsession with his music in like 2021. Those were some of the hits of the playlist, I guess. [laughs]
Do you mind sharing your first impressions of each other when you first met? How did the playlist come up in conversation?
RO: Before I met you, I was always asking Allison, when she was playing the playlist in the apartment, “What song is this? This is so good!” And she would always tell me it was from the playlist that her friend Pearl made her. So, when I did meet you, I was like, “I’m super into that playlist. I learned a lot of good music from it.”
PAD: Yeah, but it took a minute. I feel like my first impression of Richard was that he was just a very charming, fun guy. It was such a bizarre experience. I came to visit my friend Allison, and she was like, “You can have my room for the weekend, and I’ll just stay with my partner.” And I was like, “Okay.” So it was just Richard and I sitting and talking in the apartment for a lot of the weekend. We got to know each other really well, and we just had good conversations – banter, dare I say – back and forth for hours. Maybe it was the first night, we were at a bar called Pearls in our neighborhood, and I think Mac Miller was playing and I was so excited about it. I had been listening to Richard’s music because I knew you were friends with Allison, but I didn’t know you lived with her. I think we had followed each other on Instagram. So I was listening to his music, and we were at this bar, and I was like, “I have a little secret. I’m a big fan of your music.” And then you were like, “I’ve been listening to this playlist that you made for Allison.” It felt very much like, here’s this little secret, and here’s this other little secret – some vulnerability of admitting to being a fan of the other.
RO: Which it was cool to hear, because I was like, “Oh, you heard my music? That’s crazy.”
PAD: I listened to it the whole plane ride, I feel like.
Richard, did that feel like a moment of vulnerability for you, too?
RO: I mean, definitely. I actually had to find the playlist myself because Allison wouldn’t send it to me. I literally looked up “colorado 2 omaha” and your name on Spotify. That was weird to admit. [laughs] I was like, “I, uh…” But after we hung out for a couple of days, I asked if you made music at all, and you were like, “Yeah, sometimes I play guitar and write songs.” I was like, “Well, I’d love to hear any ideas you have, anything you’ve written.” You played me some voice memos that I thought were awesome. I’d listen to them on my earbuds—
PAD: I couldn’t listen to them with him. I was so shy and rejection-sensitive. We’d be walking around the apartment, and I’d be like, “You have to listen to this on your headphones while I walk beside you. I hope you like it.”
RO: Yeah, it was great. We immediately started recording one of the ideas, kind of demoed it out. Then we started hanging out, and you came to visit again. We started writing ‘Toad Mode’.
PAD: Actually, we made that CD – we stayed up all night and made this mix CD. We were just freaking out over playlists and songs. I think that weekend, you were cooking or something, and I was in charge of the queue. The last night I was in New York, we stayed up and made this CD, which I think you brought to Atlanta at some point. That was fun. We also watched music videos that night, too. And we ate very bad tacos. They were super dry, remember?
RO: Oh, yeah, from a place we never heard of. We made a playlist called that. I think it was the caption: “Really Dry Tacos.”
How did the conversation shift from making demos together to forming a band?
PAD: I’m curious about your answer to this.
RO: I feel like we made a song together, duet style – I’ll sing a part, you sing a part, and we’re writing these things on the guitar, writing about whatever we want really naturally. We were like, “Let’s record it, listen back to it, work on it some more,” and then, “Let’s put it out and see what happens. Let’s come up with a name for this song, for this project.” And when we were like, “Let’s play shows.”
PAD: That’s funny because I think about it so much more – not strategically, but when we first started making stuff together, like ‘Toad Mode’, it was just you playing guitar, singing a melody, then I’d sing a melody. It all felt very natural. But then it kind of spiraled, and I was like, “We’ve got to take this seriously!” [laughs] I would, like, force us to have business meetings every week. But making music – I don’t know, it just kind of happened. You would visit me when I lived in Atlanta, and we would always end up making music together. It was always kind of happening, and I was like, “Well, we have to take this seriously, don’t we?” And that dichotomy is totally us – serious, but also not serious at all.
RO: But it’s like, naturally serious, you know? It’s not like a joke to me, but it happens really organically. It’s like, “Let’s just do this and then do this,” and then ‘Toad Mode’ came out and it was like, “Let’s do this a little more for real.” It was so cool to see us put some real focus and hard work in it – playing shows, getting some friends to play with us.
Richard, you’ve mentioned you had a more proper musical background, and Pearl, you were more into writing at that stage. Do you feel like you offered each other a kind of outside perspective on both music and writing?
PAD: Yeah, definitely.
RO: It was really shocking to me to hear some of your first songs, because it would be something I would never normally think to do – like a six-minute song that changes very slightly, but the lyrics just flow through. It felt so extreme at the time, I didn’t really understand it. But just the way that she’s influenced how I view structure and what a song should be, and how it should exist, that blueprint – it’s really exciting now. It’s all very feeling-based and like, “What if we just did this instead?” or “What if we added a whole new section right here?” And I’m like, “Oh yeah, why not? It feels natural to do that.” That was huge for me.
PAD: For me, with Richard and his understanding of music and the thought behind certain things, I never really – I grew up taking piano lessons, but I got kicked out by my teacher. She literally said, “We can’t waste your mom’s money anymore,” because I wouldn’t practice. It’s like I wanted the feeling, but I couldn’t actually understand it. I couldn’t get to that point. So having the safety of someone to be like, “Okay, let’s figure this out,” and rein it in almost a bit, while also caring as much as I do about how it feels and how it sounds, the musicality – I have so much trust in Richard and his opinions on that.
RO: Yeah, that’s the cool thing – my opinions are probably very different since knowing you on a lot of things. Friends will send me demos of their songs, and I’ll have a moment where I’m like, “This is actually so sick.” And maybe me, three years ago, would have said, “You should cut this intro in half,” really focusing on pop structure, because I just did that all the time. But now I’m like, “Actually, this should kind of jam longer in this section here.” That’s such a shift for me. It’s so exciting to create with you like that.
PAD: It’s pretty awesome.
RO: Also, your lyrics are something that’s really new to me too. I always wrote my own lyrics, but you have a very different perspective on writing lyrics.
PAD: You do too, though. Like, with our song ‘Shady Sadie’, all the parts that I’m singing were probably ones I wrote at my day job, just about a customer I’d seen or whatever interactions I’d had. And then for all the call-and-responses, that was all you, like the “slaughter the lamb” part. I was like, “I don’t know where this is going.” I came back from getting water or something, and you had this awesome prose written. I was like, “That’s it, that doesn’t need to change at all.”
This out-of-the-box thinking makes me think about the ending of ‘Angel Blessing’, with this almost black metal growling set against the song’s angelic vocals. I feel like that’s another fascinating dichotomy on the EP. I’m curious what draws you to this interplay of horror, comedy, and intimacy that stretches across Sex Week.
PAD: I feel like it’s just our perspective on life. Maybe that’s too crazy to say, but I think we have that kind of dynamic with each other and with life in general – the world is so gross and dark, but also really funny and light. It just exists, and it’s cool that we get to see it. We get to explore that through music, which is really fun and cool to me.
RO: Yeah. Honestly, that’s such a hard and cool question because I don’t really know. That’s a really sick answer, though. When I think about it, I guess I just like that stuff. I like movies that are really beautiful, dreamlike, sweet, but have this strange underbelly of mystery and darkness. I love Twin Peaks, that’s a show I think of and reference all the time. It has this small-town beauty thing, but there’s some of the worst things happening at the same time. That portal between those worlds – where does that fit?
PAD: It’s very weird and funny. I also think when we first started hanging out and making music, we were watching a lot of David Cronenberg. I had never seen any of his movies before, and then we watched eXistenZ and Dead Ringers. This isn’t Cronenberg, but we also watched Possession at the same time. When I think about it, I’m like, wow, those movies definitely had some influence. I feel like they affected me very deeply as a creative person. I was like, “He just did that, that’s crazy.”
RO: Like, “What world is this?”
Richard, you described ‘Kid Muscle’ as a song that feels like it’s from another planet, which was interesting to me, because lyrically, it feels like one of the most grounded and sweetest songs on the album. It’s almost like the first four songs follow a kind of dreamlike logic, and then ‘Kid Muscle’ brings things down to a more human-to-human level.
RO: It’s true, it does feel more digestible in a human way. It’s funny that I was like, “I wanted it to feel like the opposite of that,” and then for the other songs to mostly be like that.
PAD: That’s awesome too because it’s just that perspective thing. Like, “Ah, yes, all these other songs are so normal.” But it’s cool that ‘Kid Muscle’ feels grounded and human. It’s our most conversational song, I feel like.
Sonically it does have that otherworldly element, which makes me wonder how separate the writing and production usually are on these songs. Is it a case of having a demo or lyrics first, and then things get warped as you build on it?
RO: With ‘Kid Muscle’, I just made a guitar loop with the drums. That’s what you hear on the final version, but it was just that on the loop. The way we go about it, Pearl freestyles a lot, and it’s like, “Put me on the mic, and we’ll just track it.”
PAD: I had written some lyrics on my notes app, and I was like, “Oh my god, this is the sound for these lyrics!” But then I got really frustrated because what I was hearing in my head for the melody wasn’t coming out. So it actually took a minute for ‘Kid Muscle’ to be made because I was so frustrated that I didn’t have that musical ability yet since we had just started writing. And then finally, I was like, “I need to be…” I went into the closet with a blanket over my head and the mic, and I was like, “Okay, now I can do it.” [laughs] It was such a process. The lyrics, I think, were mostly written, but the emotionality I feel like came through from the process of just making it.
RO: Yeah, your whole whisper thing, that came really naturally when you were in that moment, which was really cool. But in that space, there was this long freestyle take where you had the whole outro, and we kept that original outro quiet in the final version.
Following on from ‘Kid Muscle’, I love how ‘Naked’ and ‘Toad Mode’ are similar in that they feel almost like you’re trading lyrics. Did the writing process feel as conversational as the verses do in those songs? Did that require a kind of vulnerability you hadn’t reached before?
PAD: ‘Naked’ was definitely very conversational. We were Facetiming, and I think we had a 16-minute voice memo of us just riffing back and forth. And then we were both in New York, and that’s when the structure came together. But I remember that was hard to figure out, I don’t remember why.
RO: At one point, we were writing the whole song as if it were the chorus melody. But it was very back-and-forth, ‘Summer Nights’ Grease vibes, where it’s awkward and shy, and just being able to open up to someone – it’s like the ultimate vulnerability, you know, being naked.
PAD: Both in the literal and metaphysical sense. ‘Toad Mode’ was the first thing we ever really did together, and it just came out of us being in the room, playing guitar. I think we literally wrote the whole structure in one sitting.
You directed the music videos for the EP yourselves. Whether it’s for Sex Week or other artists, what’s different about working together in that capacity, creating a visual world?
RO: A lot of the time, we have the same goals in a broader sense, but the way we go about things is very different. You’re very structured, and I’m more like, “Let’s just see what happens.” That’s crazy, I’ve realized—
PAD: But it totally works. I think we need both. ‘Toad Mode’ was our first music video, and we had two separate ideas and got so heated at each other. We got so passionate about it, and then in the end we were like, “Bye, see you later,” because I had to go to work or something. We spent some time apart where were like, “Actually, maybe that’s a good point,” and then we come back together and it becomes more of like—
RO: Let’s combine our ideas, try to make it work
PAD: And then it always does find its way. We’re very passionate about filmmaking – and music as well, but it becomes a different thing when it’s also visual.
RO: With ‘Angel Blessings’, we were on the same page. We decided to shoot on the beach in Long Island, get some shots of me playing, some of you, and we’d just edit it together the next day.
PAD: We had grand ideas – I was like, “It’s gonna be slow-mo and reversed, so I’m going to have to memorize the song backwards,” and that did not happen. [laughs] But we’ve definitely gotten into a rhythm with working.
RO: When there is that conflict, we always have that ability to just be like, “Let’s compromise,” and it’s usually pretty easy.
PAD: It’s fun to have opinions and know that we can come together and find something new.
I have to ask about the cat in the ‘Toad Mode’ video.
PAD: Yeah, that’s Toad. That is the guy.
RO: He’s a cat, Allison’s cat, and his name is Toad. He’s someone that you knew when he was a little kitten?
PAD: Yeah. How I know Allison and how we became friends is because I was also living with her in LA. And when I was living with her, that’s when she got her cat, Boo and Toad. They were like little babies. Boo is very special as well, but Toad was just such a ham from day one, and we always had a very special bond. And then, when Richard and Allison were living together, I feel like you also had a very special connection with Toad too.
RO: Yeah, he’s a really cool cat.
PAD: But that was one of the things, when were having our passionate “’Toad Mode’ needs to be like this” moment, I was like, “There needs to be a giant cat walking all over the screen.”
RO: I didn’t see it, I didn’t understand it!
PAD: And then we just got a green screen, and Toad – he loves nutritional yeast, so we were sprinkling nutritional yeast, and he would go to it. [laughs] It was like directing a cat… I don’t think I can recommend that.
RO: He was good, though. He was great.
PAD: And Boo’s in the video too. He made an appearance, definitely, to pay homage to the brother.
You said you feel like you’ve found your rhythm. Is your mind already on the next project?
PD: Definitely. I feel like we have some songs that didn’t quite make it onto the EP, just because they didn’t find their sound yet. The was one where I did a lot of the production – it was kind of like a role reversal for us. I get really excited about that one, and hopefully that will come out at some point. Whenever we have time, we’re working on music. It’s just kind of inevitable. I had a melody the other day, and I was like, “We need to record this right now.”
Could you one thing that inspires you about each other, whether it’s personal or musical?
RO: Good question.
PAD: I got one. I feel like Richard’s patience and openness are very inspiring to me. I like to think I’m also pretty open, but I can also be very narrow-minded as well. I think Richard’s ability to sit through things is really admirable and inspiring.
RO: That’s really cool. One thing about you that really inspires me, which is something I’ve talked a little bit about, is how you have such a different sense of going about creating anything – whether it’s visual, film, color, sound, or how a song works. It has completely altered the way I listen to and create music, and how I watch movies. It’s changed it. Your ability to follow intuition and take risks is such a huge thing for me because it’s always been difficult for me to do something I felt was risky, but I wanted to do it. So, thank you for that.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Sex Week’s Sex Week EP is out August 30 via Grand Jury.
