FEATURE:
Modern-Day Queens
girli
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IT is exciting…
that girli has a run of Australian dates early next year. This London artist is one I have been following since the start of her career. Around 2018/2019. Her latest album, it’s just my opinion, came out in May. I will end with a review of that album. I am keen to get to some interviews, as there are some who are not aware of girli. Known as Milly Toomey to her friends and family, the world knows her as girli. I am keen to get to interviews now. The Forty-Five spoke with girli ahead of the release of her third album. The powerful single, Slap on the Wrist, was out. Its themes and what it explores sadly relevant and timely right now, considering what is happening in the news. High-profile men and their crimes of sexual abuse and grooming:
“Chances are, every woman you know has a story about sexual harassment or violence. We all know how frustrating it is to stuff keys between fists, to have no choice but to send ‘I’m home safe’ confirmation texts, and how the justice system continually fails us.
Alt-pop artist girli has been speaking out about sexual harassment for years, both in her real life and her music. Underneath girli is Milly Toomey, who, like many of us, was sexually harassed for the first time as a child in her school uniform. Now an independent artist with a self-cultivated safe and inclusive working environment, she’s never written anything quite as potent with rage and upset as her new single, ‘Slap On The Wrist’.
The track marks the second single from her third album, which is due to arrive in May this year. Sonically, she’s reconnecting with the music she fell in love with as a teenager, and lyrically her stories explore all the shades of love, anger, mess and magic as a queer woman in the 2020s. She tells The Forty-Five what’s to come from album three, and why ‘Slap On The Wrist’ is one of the most important songs she’s ever penned…
When you first started to write for this new album, what were the initial emotions that came up? How did you start to work through those?
“Every time I go to write a new project, I always have an existential crisis where I’m like, ‘Who am I as an artist? What do I write now?’ I definitely had a few months where I was like, ‘OK, I want to keep writing music, but what am I working towards?’ I knew I wanted to make the jump straight into working on a new album; I didn’t want to faff around with the whole EP thing, I’ve done so many of those. I write a lot, so there was going to be no difficulty in writing enough songs for it. There was a real cocktail of emotions; I don’t think I’ve ever written a project that’s just about one thing. The first things I started writing about were being confused about my identity in the world, and then an activist element came into it. ‘Slap On The Wrist’ was actually the last song I wrote.”
The music video for this song is so impactful. You’ve got images that recreate the locations of where real women were assaulted: in a bedroom, at work, in the park with their child. There is still this outdated idea that women only get assaulted in an alley by someone that they don’t know, and there’s a narrative going around from the far right about ‘protecting women’ and a false idea about who they’re protecting us from. How have you felt watching that unfold over the last few months?
“It’s been insane. Everything that has happened since I wrote the song has made it feel more relevant. One of the things I wanted to bring attention to in the song and the video was to show that sexual assault does not just happen in a dark alleyway by a masked assailant. I’ve experienced, like most women, sexual harassment since I was like… I think the first time I experienced it, I was 12 on the way to school wearing my school uniform. It’s so woven into our lives. It’s obscene that we have to be so expectant of violence every day.
“For the video, I collaborated with my friend Eliza [Hatch] who runs Cheer Up Luv, which is this amazing feminist platform. She had this photo project that started off Cheer Up Luv of survivors in the places where they were assaulted as a form of taking back power, but also showing this happens everywhere. This happens in the day, at the park, it happens to people of all ages, races, sexualities. It happens to pregnant people, it happens to literal children. The media tries to paint this image of the perpetrators as these alien, crazy people. Actually, the people who perpetrate these crimes are everyday men; they’re the person at work, they’re your brother, your dad, your friend, your doctor, your teacher. The far right trying to pin it only on immigrants is just one of the ways where it’s being deflected off the real issue: as a society, we don’t care about violence against women. It’s not prioritised at all.”
When you make your music, you mostly work with women and queer people. Has that always been the case for you? What do you enjoy most about this working environment?
“It hasn’t always been that way – I made it that way. When I was first signed, I was still in my late teens, and my whole team were men. I’d go into big label offices with a whole boardroom of just men and talk to them about my music. My whole life and career changed, because I got dropped from my first label. Then after COVID, I really wanted to do things differently. I want to have more women on my team and more creative control. I want to sing about feminism and queer issues. I didn’t want anyone to tell me that not commercially viable. That experience has been so special, because you should enjoy the process of making music and making art. What’s the point if you’re not? I wanted to do it with people who I would feel safe and comfortable around.”
The next interview is from The Honey Pop. Chatting with girli a few days before the release of her wonderful album, it is an interesting interview. I have known about girli for a number of years – well, her music, anyway -, and it is great that she continues to put out such remarkable work. One of our very best artists. I know she will keep putting out stunning albums for years to come:
“Your third album, it’s just my opinion, is just days away! What are the emotions that you feel leading up to this release?
I felt really nervous when I announced the album! The classic trepidation of questioning yourself and the project as soon as it’s exposed to the world, but now I feel so proud of it and elated that it’s out in the world.
And on a similar wavelength, as you release more full-body projects, how do the emotions leading up to a release change?
It’s funny because I think the word “release” has a double meaning here – when you release a song into the world, there’s a mental and emotional release too. Something you’ve worked on for so long and have hyped up to your fans is finally out and you have to find a way to be proud and positive about it regardless of its critical or commercial reception. Separating art from capitalism is hard but so necessary for every artist’s sanity.
Making an album takes a village, and it’s often so easy to find time to thank the other people involved and recognize their contributions, but it can be harder to pat yourself on the back. What is something that you personally accomplished during the cycle of crafting this album that you want to pat yourself on the back for?
I accomplished some pretty amazing accolades during this album cycle, but I’m actually proudest of what I accomplished with my mindset. I have spent so much time in the music industry doubting myself and feeling like a failure and have let those negative emotions eclipse the joy in making art and sharing it with my fans. This album, I made a promise to myself to shift my attitude and enjoy the process, and I really did!”.
One more interview to come to before a review of it’s just my opinion. Crave Music spent some time with girli earlier in the year. If anyone has yet to discover the world of girli, then I would urge you to check her out. Such a wonderful artist. I have not seen her live yet. I will have to correct that next year maybe. I also would love to interview her too. The remarkable girli is a sensation:
“CRAVE: Where did the inspiration for the album’s title come from and how does that tie into some themes found on it?
GIRLI: With this album release, and I guess my whole career really being quite [an] outspoken political queer woman making music, a lot of my stuff that I share is to do with activism. I like talking about that in my songs, but I talk about that anyway online.
One of the songs in this album campaign, “Slap On The Wrist,” is a feminist activism song calling out perpetrators of sexual violence. I was really finding when I was releasing this song that the amount of hatred that I was every day experiencing online from, obviously not from my fans, but from misogynistic, homophobic, nasty people.
I realized, wow, this has really been a theme throughout just being a woman in the public eye who refuses to conform and is outspoken. It took me so long to decide what to call the album, and I didn’t decide until literally the last minute deadline that my label gave me. I realized when people have polarizing and often nasty opinions, they’ll use the phrase, “it’s just my opinion.”
That’s almost a way to excuse some hatred, basically. I thought, Well, okay, if that’s just your opinion, this is just my opinion. Opinion and our voices are so powerful and it’s not just anything. I thought it was fun turning that on its head and being like, Cool, well these are just my queer feminist songs so maybe don’t get so angry then?
Especially with putting out music that is about feminist issues, the amount of men in my comments being like, “Why are you so worked up? Why are you so angry?” And it’s like, why are you so worked up? How does [my freedom] impact you as the privileged person? So, I wanted to turn that on its head.
CRAVE: I love the way that you broke that down. It actually gave me the perfect little segue into the next questions because I did want to take a second to talk about “Slap On The Wrist.” This song bravely calls out society’s unforgiving attitude towards survivors of abuse, assault, and harassment and condemns the lack of accountability for this behavior. What was your breaking point to write a song about this? How does it feel to be able to bring light to this topic and use your platform as a female artist?
GIRLI: I’ve been releasing music for 10 years and I’ve always been very outspoken on feminist issues. Even before I was making music, when I was in high school, I would call myself a feminist. I was always campaigning for different issues and going to protests. I think when I was in the studio writing “Slap On The Wrist,” I was like, I can’t believe I haven’t written a song about this yet.
I feel like sometimes with something like that, you can’t force it. It will just come when it comes. I felt the feminine rage that day and it felt really amazing to fully put my feelings about that topic into words and into music. It’s been really beautiful to be able to share it and have so many people reach out and be like, this song is really meaningful and really speaks to me.
Obviously it’s a double-edged sword because it’s so upsetting that so many people relate to it because it’s about something so traumatizing. It means a lot to me that hopefully people can find solace and solidarity in listening to a song that reminds them of their own stories.
It’s also been very rage-baity apparently for a lot of people online as well, which is insane to me because it’s not a controversial topic. I’m literally just saying can we please treat sexual assault as a serious thing? Let’s review: Why are we angry about this?
CRAVE: Do you think that the creative process for this record differed from your first two releases, Matriarchy and Odd One Out, in any ways?
GIRLI: I think this was the first album where before I’d written any of the songs, I was setting out to write an album. It was very intentional. In those past two albums, I’d be touring or I’d be doing other promo and stuff, and then I’d just write songs here and there and be like, oh, I’ve written quite a lot of songs. I guess it’s an album. This time I set out to write an album and I went into the studio in blocks of time to really focus on that and allowed myself a whole year of hardly any touring and just focusing on writing. It felt really amazing.
If you are a band and you have musicians and you’re a group, it’s slightly more of okay, cool, we’re gonna tour now and then we’re gonna go into the studio and write and then we’re gonna talk. There’s a bit more structure. I think when you’re a solo pop artist, a lot of the time you squeeze in songwriting where you can and it’s a lot less concentrated. Sometimes it’s really good to be able to have a block of time to be creative so that felt really good.
CRAVE: When people leave a girli show, what is one thing you want people to take away from the experience?
GIRLI: I want them to feel like they have a community. They have a place that’s like a safe haven and [to] feel empowered”.
Let’s finish off with CLASH and their review of it’s just my opinion. There is no doubt that girli grows and evolves between albums. In terms of confidence and quality. I think her 2019 debut, Odd One Out, is phenomenal. Though her third album may be her best yet:
“GIRLI has spent the past few years establishing a space that combines produced pop essence and underground energy with a sense of political and personal identity. Her work (and the community she surrounds herself with) have always seen themes of LGBTQ+ visibility, feminism, and self-expression, not just through her lyrics, but the politics she endorses.
Building on the momentum of her breakthrough sophomore album, ‘Matriarchy’, she has continued to establish herself as an artist who’s unafraid to say exactly what she means, pairing bright production with writing that feels intimate and intentional.
On her latest album, ‘it’s just my opinion’, GIRLI goes even further with that duality. The sound is more cohesive but still restless in the way that always made her music exciting. Glossy, hook-led moments dominate the record with occasional setbacks into stripped-back moments – allowing the tracks to develop a sense of movement without feeling at odds with itself. It’s pop, but it’s pop with a bite.
There are definite stand out moments that define the range the album holds. ‘Slap On The Wrist’ is one of its most direct statements. It takes on sexual violence in an anthem full of anger and hurt, which calls for a more rigorous accountability with a powerful immediacy. In contrast, ‘Squirm’ arguably proved to be the instrumentally strongest track, with production playing as important a role as lyrics. Finally, there’s ‘Lifestyle’, which is the nearest thing to a ballad on the album, not entirely acoustically stripped but stripped back enough by GIRLI’s standards for vulnerability to break through the surface, a momentary break in the otherwise fast-paced album.
Lyric-wise, the album thrives on its honesty. There’s a sense of confession running throughout, but it feels self-aware rather than overexposed. GIRLI continues to explore themes around identity, relationships, and self-perception, capturing that in-between stage of figuring things out in a way that feels relatable without trying too hard to be. It’s intimate but lead by a powerful sense of playfulness.
If anything, the album sometimes feels a little too comfortable within its own sound world. A little bit of variation in certain moments could have taken the record even higher, although it never takes away from the overall listening experience. Instead, it gives the album a consistency that many pop releases aim to achieve.
What stands out most is her sense of growth. There’s a confidence here – not just in the music itself, but in the overall vision of the project. It feels like an artist who understands not just her sound, but how to present it – building a cohesive aesthetic and narrative that ties everything together. From the imagery to the tone of the campaign, there’s a clear sense of identity running throughout, giving the project a distinct presence that holds itself beyond the tracks themselves.
Overall it’s a strong step forward for GIRLI. It might not be a full renovation, but it doesn’t have to be. It is an album that is fully aware of itself and the expectations surrounding it. It demonstrates a sense of growth, personality, and artistic direction while leaving room for bigger moments the next time around.
7/10”.
It is true that girli is an artist I am a great admirer of. The exceptional it’s just my opinion is an album that needs to be heard by everyone. I do feel that she will continue to grow and build her sound. A fourth album topping this one. Not a negative thing at all. I feel girli is always looking to grow as an artist and release the finest music. She is definitely doing that. Go and follow her on social media. I love absolutely…
EVERYTHING she does.
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