Girl in Red Brings A-Game to Album
Beloved lesbian singer Marie Ulven reaches new heights
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Do you listen to girl in
red?
To most adults, that’s
a simple inquiry, but
for teenage girls on social media, it
means “are you a lesbian?”
Even before releasing her debut
album “if I could make it go quiet,”
21-year-old Norwegian singer/
songwriter Marie Ulven (aka girl
in red) has become an icon. This
album’s fi rst single, “Serotonin,” is
also her fi rst radio hit, but “We Fell
In Love in October” and “I Wanna
Be Your Girlfriend,” released in
2017 and 2018, have already gone
gold. She has had all this success
without the backing of a major label,
instead deciding to release “if I
could make it go quiet” on her own
with distribution through AWAL.
Girl in red’s album also marks
a coming out for the Internet-born
genre of bedroom pop. Artists like
Clairo and mxmtoon reached a
wide audience, mostly made of teenage
girls, by releasing roughly recorded
tracks on YouTube, Sound-
Cloud and Bandcamp. Like girl in
red, Clairo and mxmtoon are both
queer. Clairo’s current hit “Sofi a” is
a love song addressed to a woman.
While Billie Eilish has been signed
to Interscope since 2015, she took
an aesthetic adjacent to bedroom
pop to an even larger audience.
(Her brother Finneas, who cowrites
and produces all of Eilish’s
music, also produced “Serotonin.”)
After releasing two eps, girl in red
made the move to recording her
debut album in a professional studio.
The intimacy of bedroom pop
was one of its biggest draws. Its
circulation through YouTube paralleled
the popularity of vlogs on
the platform, and the notion of
strength through exposing vulnerability
owes something both to
Tumblr and emo. Girl in red recorded
“if I could make it go quiet” in
Bergen, eight hours from her home
in Oslo, and fi gured out her plans
for its songwriting and production
by listening to her demos on repeat
for hours during that long drive.
The cover of girl in red’s debut album.
If “Serotonin” is a calling card
to an audience beyond girl in red’s
core base, its frankness about
mental health issues has a lot of
company in the past decade’s music,
from Soccer Mommy’s “circle
the drain” to the late Lil Peep and
Juice WLRD’s many songs linking
their drug use as to severe anxiety
and depression. Like “circle
the drain,” “serotonin” starts with
a guitar riff evoking ‘90s indie
rock, but its brightness is ironic.
The song’s chorus sounds upbeat
musically, but the lyrics are less
hopeful. The verses get grimmer
as the song switches genres. Over
a distorted, near-dubstep beat, she
raps “I get intrusive thoughts/like
burning my hair off/like hurting
someone I love.” Without coming
to a conclusion, “Serotonin” ends
with an oddly distant sample of an
orchestra and a few sentences in
Norwegian.
Girl in red’s blunt attitude towards
sex, love, and mental health is apparent
simply from surveying this
album’s song titles: “Did You Come?,”
“Body and Mind,” “hornylovesickmess,”
FREDRIK WIIG SØRENSEN
and “You Stupid Bitch.”
The album covers an emotional
range that acknowledges passion
doesn’t always spring from the
healthiest attitudes. Lyrics like
“you stupid bitch/can’t you see?/
the perfect one for you is me” do
not sound any less ugly when addressed
by a woman to another
woman. But particularly on the
album’s second half, she shows
off a greater vulnerability, with “I’ll
Call You Mine” accepting the risk
MUSIC
of getting hurt in a relationship.
As she accepts her life’s messiness,
her song structures refl ect
this. Like “Serotonin,” “hornylovesickmess”
drains its energy out
over a long coda — this one consisting
of mumbled, barely audible
vocals and helicopter sound effects
— rather than following a conventional
structure.
If girl in red’s aesthetic refl ects
an agnosticism towards genre,
she’s also basically making rock
music. Most of the drums sound
programmed, but the album is
full of her guitar playing. “Kate’s
Not Here,” recorded for last year’s
soundtrack to the fi lm “The Turning,”
could’ve passed for a ‘90s altrock
hit, and several other songs
continue in that direction. Her
cover of the Weeknd’s “Save Your
Tears” changes its mood from a
coked-up Miami nightclub in 1984
to CBGB’s in 1978. She’s also adept
at piano-based ballads, like
“Midnight Love.”
The album sounds big in a way
that girl in red’s fi rst two eps never
did, taking musical inspiration
from the melodrama of its lyrics.
“If I could make it go quiet” is her
equivalent of Eilish’s “When We All
Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” because
it is self-conscious about the
prospect of reaching arenas. If she
had something to prove, she fortunately
brought her A-game as a
songwriter.
GIRL IN RED | “if I could make
it go quiet” | AWAL | Released April
30th
GayCityNews.com | April 22 - May 5, 2021 29
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