FEATURE:
Spotlight
Girl Group
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THIS amazing group…
are currently touring the U.K. and released their new single, She Goes, earlier this month. Girl Group might make them a hard name to Google and locate for obvious reasons, though it does also not rigidly define them in terms of their sound. You might imagine they would be making music like girl groups/bands of today/old. However, they are very different to what you may imagine! They are Katya Birkeland, Lily Christlow, Thea Gundersen, Mia Halvorsen and Maria Tollisen. Girl Group are a five-piece band based in Liverpool who formed after meeting at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in 2023. Their debut E.P., Think They’re Looking. Let’s Perform, was released earlier in the year. It is an amazing release. I am going to move to a few interviews with Girl Group. I am going to start out with music is to blame. and their chat with them from this year:
“Girl Group — the real one — is a messy, magical, feminist force rewriting what it means to take up space in the music world. Born out of friendship, frustration, and a lot of glitter, the five-piece met at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts and decided to do things their way: fully DIY, fully woman-led, and fully chaotic in the best way.
Music Is To Blame caught up with them just before their explosive opening set for Olivia Dean in Paris, where they left a crowd of new fans screaming. With their debut EP ‘Think They’re Looking, Let’s Perform’ just released on June 20th, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. In this Seven Questions series, we talk about community, being fangirls, filming music videos with no budget and big dreams, and the power of building something that feels like home.
Introduce yourselves and where you're from.
Mia: We are four Norwegian girls: me, Thea, Maria, Katya are from Norway, and Lil is from Yorkshire!
Lil: We’re all from all over, but we met in Liverpool at Uni.
Mia: So, the band started in Liverpool!
What do our readers need to know about Girl Group?
Mia: Our main goal with Girl Group is to try and challenge the boys club in the music industry. One of the most important things for us is to bring women together and get each other and ourselves to believe more in ourselves and each other. Also, show that a woman's way of doing things could be just as good or even better. We want to champion all the genders – especially in the time we live in, I think it’s very important to include as many people as you can. For us, it’s been important to prioritise women and non binary people, especially in a system constantly trying to put them down. This is our main point – while trying to have fun!
Thea: We also want to create a comfortable place for us. In the music industry, there’s a lot of misogyny. Having a safe space where women can bring ideas and not feel stupid, underappreciated, or not good enough, is our goal.
Mia: The safety of making mistakes as well. When you grow up, you’re being told that you don’t belong somewhere or that you have to be perfect to belong there. But you will never be perfect if you can’t make mistakes!
What are your three “desert island” albums?
Mia: As a group, Wet Leg’s debut album is kinda what brought us together. We are obsessed with Addison Raye’s style. We’ve also been heavily inspired by Brat [ed. Charli XCX’s album]! It just makes sense – we are so different as well, it’s the girly pops that are bringing us together. It’s cool, strong women, that are being very unapologetic and out there.
Lil: It’s been very cool to see pop women being more and more experimental – like Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter or Lily Allen.
Mia: I think the EP coming out on the 20th is heavily inspired by Brat since we finished it that Brat summer!”.
I will come to Bricks Magazine. Published in July, this was a talk with a five-piece who encapsulate and define Zen G girlhood. They discussed “Spice Girls, Y2K nostalgia, and their DIY ethos inspired their debut EP”. This is a group that we will be talking about for years to come:
“While the sound of the EP jumps between dance, drum ’n‘ bass, and crunchy indie, one band unified them early on. “Wet Leg’s album was the first piece of music that we all just absolutely loved and couldn’t stop listening to together,” says Maria.
That feminist legacy runs deep. “From the very first session we ever did, that was what we were writing about: our experience being in Liverpool and being a woman in Liverpool,” explains Katya. The band doesn’t just sing together – they write every lyric in full collaboration. “We don’t have a main couple writers,” Maria emphasises. “Having those conversations beforehand, that’s been important to us.”
Mia adds: “I think we all have this hunger to write about things we’re really engaged in – like feminism – but also focusing on the fun sides of being a woman, and the painful sides, but sometimes in a playful way.”
“It’s a process of sitting down and seeing what happens, but also planning a bit: like, what do we want to make a song about today, while still keeping to the themes of what we stand for and who we are as people?” Thea explains of the group’s writing set-up. “I don’t think it was planned too much in terms of one song sounding a certain way. We wanted to be genre-fluid so we didn’t want to confine ourselves to one style. There’s a rockier song, a DnB track, and more of a party anthem. Altogether, it creates a full body of work.”
Girlhood & nostalgia
For Girl Group, girlhood isn’t a phase to outgrow – it’s a lens through which to create. Rather than sanitising or mocking it, the band taps into its weirdness, intensity, and emotional excess. Their lyrics bounce between bratty and vulnerable, but always orbit the kinds of feelings you might scribble into a childhood diary: jealousy, fantasy, unfiltered rage.
That rawness is part of what makes the EP hit so hard. There’s yearning underneath the pop shine, and a kind of emotional maximalism that feels distinctly teenage in the best way. “Some of the things that we’ve bonded over and that we love to talk about as inspiration are the kinds of things that we [all grew up with] in our early girlhood,” says Maria.
More than just a nostalgic moodboard, Girl Group’s take on girlhood is about reclaiming softness and silliness on their own terms. “When I was a teenager, I suddenly realised, ‘oh, it’s not cool to like girly things’,” reflects Mia. “Then you grow up and you realise – you should [take] joy in those things.”
While the group is based in Liverpool, their origins stretch across borders – four of the five members are Norwegian, and the contrast between cultures is something they feel deeply. “Stylistically, I feel really influenced by where I’ve lived in my life,” Katya says. “I grew up in Oslo, then moved to Liverpool, and seeing how people dress – it’s very defined, and in a very different way.”
“In Norway, you’re not really supposed to make much out of yourself,” adds Mia. “You’re not supposed to stand out. Coming to Liverpool, you were supposed to take up that space – we would never make this music if we’d stayed in Norway.”
Still, Oslo lingers in their creative process. “There’s so much space there, literally,” Lil says, recounting a recent trip to Norway that the group took together. “It’s slower, too. That’s been a really nice part of working over there, it does feel very rooted in a specific time”.
I will finish with a new interview from CLASH that caught my eye. I am quite new to Girl Group, but they make an instant impression, and you know that they are going to dominate the scene. Inspiring so many women and girls. They are not only making music that feels true to them and is authentic. They are also creating music that speaks to other women and is for them:
“I think we all came to university thinking, ‘wow, we’re gonna be pop stars’, just to realise the sexism we experienced in the outside world still exists here. We weren’t respected or included, which is a common experience for women in any field,” explains Maria. “I read The Second Sex and it explained a phenomenon which really resonated with me,” Mia chimes in. “It talks of the heteronormative society we’re in and how we’re forced to love our oppressor and hate ourselves, or see other women as competition. When really, the only way to change the system is to bring ourselves together. As soon as you recognise that, everything shifts. You can focus on the incredible sides of being a girl, as well as the issues we still face.”
It’s this statement that seems to encapsulate the heart of Girl Group’s music. Beyond their playfulness and synergy, perhaps the most profound part of their music comes from the subject matter: the everyday, often mundane, experiences of womanhood. Detailing everything from messy girls nights out, to the quiet comfort of a friend’s bedroom, Girl Group snapshot the very best and worst that femininity has to offer, celebrating it all with fierce joy. “Every song has contributions from all five of us,” Katya explains. “We want to depict exactly what happens to us and how our life is right now. The way that we wrote a lot of our lyrics was writing down conversations we would have. We felt like we captured these moments of our friend group.”
Nothing captures this unabashed revelry more than their latest single, ‘She Goes’, a track that blends confessional lyrics about female admiration with a pulsating backing that’s reminiscent of a racing motor. It’s a song that places you in the very centre of an experience that sits in the memory of every woman who listens, and yet feels refreshing to hear, like something unlocked and unburdened.
“To exist as a woman is political,” Mia continues. “We use our music to touch on gender oppression, but also to revel in the fun moments that are so true to us. Through being authentic and expressing our experiences as women, we are being political.”
With an outlook and sense of artistry that is strikingly authentic, it’s no surprise the group have found themselves on tastemakers lists. Yet, despite their organic rise, they seem to talk about the future with a sense of determination that never flinches. “Our next project is a lot more conceptual,” Maria explains. “Each song is about a lot of ideas that we’ve kind of always talked about, but really wanted to narrow down.” The sense of closeness and comfort that exudes as they converse amongst themselves feels as rare as the band’s clear, keen vision.
Through being true to themselves, Girl Group have crafted more than a collection of tracks, but a space where every woman, no matter who they are, can find something to resonate with”.
If you have not followed Girl Group yet then go and check them out. I am sure there will be another E.P. or album soon. This quintet are primed for global success. They have such a large fanbase so far but, as we look towards 2026, you know that they are going to be collection legions of new fans. Such incredible music and this close connection between the members, there is no stopping this…
MIGHTY force.
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