Girlfriend, Wife – the woozy, rising, West-Coast dream-pop duo, consisting of roommates Kacy Hill and Tessa DeNicola – have sauntered onto the indie/alternative scene with a sexy, almost unsettling L.A. limerence. She – them, both, each – posts photos of stocking-clad legs kicking slow, of hidden smiles, of arms raised in the air, all while alluding to the tricks up her (their) sleeve(s). Your treat comes in the form of ethereal soundscapes, silky vocals, and a pastel symmetry among the macabre and mundane. Their debut show will be May 8, opening for Fcukers at The Fonda in Los Angeles.
Kacy Hill, acclaimed singer-songwriter, has been producing and releasing solo music for the last decade, with four studio albums under her belt. Tessa DeNicola has similarly been pursuing her solo project, dropping a handful of singles before forming Girlfriend, Wife.
Girlfriend, Wife, both sonically and visually, craft an occluded intimacy between the embodied and the imagined. By an official definition of Lynchian, its essence strikes a balance between sinister and sincere, an artful irony, which suspends its audience in trepidation. This enigmatic dualism, within the songs as well as the songstresses, allows for flexibility in genre, with a through-line of imbued sensuality. Naturally, they asked that we preserve the mystery of their name’s origin.
Their first single “Fly Away” dropped in late 2025. The duo further teased their image and era with their second track release, “Send Me A Sign”, a moody dreamgaze siren-song, complimented by an MV of wispy vignettes and Kubrickian arm choreo. Ahead of their upcoming EP, their singles have already earned support from DJ Zane Lowe on Apple Music.
Upon the release of their third single, “Straight Shot”, a poppy taste of heaven and forlorn love, The Cold sat down with Girlfriend, Wife to speak on genre-bending, world-building, sharing an image, and shoegaze men.
The Cold Magazine (CM): Can you tell me about how the project started, and the genesis of the duo?
Kacy Hill (KH): Basically, I had been doing solo music for the last 10+ years, and was feeling really burnt out on it. I was hitting a weird point in my career where I wasn’t happy and fired my manager and needed a break.
I was starting to get into landscape design, and Tessa had been working on this solo project, but it wasn’t quite clicking in the way she wanted it to. She had written this song, “Fly Away” …and was like, “I want to put this out with someone else.”
We had this funny joke idea, not super serious, about doing this girl group.
Tessa DeNicola (TDN): Like six months prior to that, just randomly.
KH: And this [song] came about, I was like “I’ll do this with you!” That week, we went into my room and started writing. It was really fun.
TDN: It was kind of just a bit, and then we were like, wait… We both needed something. We were both very exhausted, and having a weird relationship with music. I think this is something that was destined in a way.
CM: That time writing in the room, how did that look?
TDN: It was just throwing shit at the wall. If you put a camera in that room, it would be concerning. With “Fly Away” we put it out with DistroKid that week.
In the beginning, we were just doing it for fun and for ourselves. We’re not trying to be ‘anonymous’, but we’re gonna operate like 2016 SoundCloud rappers.
We’ve been pulling inspo from Esthero and Madonna music era, now developing it into a sound that comes out of both of our taste.
KH: I think it started more shoegaze-y. I was producing the demos, so it was just me on guitar, producing that lofi-y stuff. Our music taste spans so far from that, so we were like, how do we make it more fun? The more we started digging into this pop-leaning stuff, all of a sudden, it had a bigger life.
TDN: We were saying it’s like if Dean Blunt were to make music for a Rom Com.
CM: I was thinking the same thing, a lot of the promotion categorised it as shoegaze, but it felt like it went beyond that.
KH: It also feels like, what the hell is shoegaze? Shoegaze is this blanket term that is put on anything that’s got fuzzy or washed out or really verby guitars.
TDN: Broad term. Isn’t it just music that makes you look down at your feet?
CM: They call it shoegaze cos it’s music for men that can’t look women in the eyes.
KH: Well they can’t do that anyways.
TDN: They’ll put on a rap song and still look down at their feet.
KH: Men are all shoegaze. There’s like five non-shoegaze men in the world.
TDN: If we’re lucky.
CM: The world of Girlfriend, Wife opens up a world of interpretation. How are you approaching that, how do you feel about the story?
TDN: A lot of the music comes from extravagant, exaggerated making-fun of what we do as women, as ourselves. There’s a lot to play with, and it’s fun to tap into your own patterns and insecurities.
KH: I think it’s not even that. What does it mean? We don’t know.
TDN: It’s not that deep.
KH: It’s funny, I feel like it takes a lot of years of doing something to do something that is kind of unserious.
CM: It’s having fun with it.
KH: I was thinking about this the other day. When you’re learning a new instrument, the first year is not fun. You’re frustrated, you can’t have fun with it yet until you know at least sort of what you’re doing. That’s how it is with a music project.
Sometimes it just takes years of knowing how to do something to do it in a way that’s finally fun, where you’re not just trying to solve an equation.
TDN: The approach innately was this natural thing. None of it was forced, it just evolved. Even aesthetically. We love grandma-core, liminal, kind of quirky…I hate to say that, so, retract.
Our home is very Florida-retiree core. Very pattern maxing. We naturally had the same taste for things, which came out of who we are as people rather than any reference.
CM: You’re not trying to attain an image, just expressing yourself.
KH: The image comes from that, but it’s about refining something that is already there.
The stuff we’re doing now, it wouldn’t work for either of our solo projects… I think there’s something Lynchian about having the two of us, where we can play into a lot of these aesthetics and images more.
There’s almost a nostalgic Americana to it, but there’s also this sexiness, in a way. Not explicit, but there’s something very specific… It’s a familiarity that feels comforting.
We’re refining this idea of how do you pull from that familiarity and make it a little weird? There’s a lot of symmetry, color, and pattern in the images.
CM: There’s still a very natural aspect that gives it a sense of comfort, while still being sensual and kind of mysterious.
TDN: She’s from Arizona, but there’s something very California, very plasticky-feel Americana that we both naturally gravitate towards.
CM: What secrets can you unveil about the single, “Straight Shot”?
KH: We started this song, like, seven weeks ago, and it was called “Manure Song” because they just laid fresh manure outside.
It feels like a great bridge into where the sound is going, because it’s starting to bridge this poppy, almost dancey-y world, while also staying true to the moody spirit of “Send Me A Sign”.
TDN: We wrote the single after we had been in the thick of writing, and it felt like a good middle ground of what’s to come, but what we’ve already been doing.
CM: Yay! And also, happy birthday Kacy.
KH: I should start lying about my age now that I’m a new band. I feel like that’s such a chic thing to do.
TDN: [Laughs]