Liverpool-based band Girl Group have released their debut EP Think They’re Looking, Let’s Perform – a project that showcases the band’s commitment to blending sharp social commentary with infectious pop melodies. The five-track EP includes previous singles ‘Yay! Saturday,’ ‘Flink Pike,’ and ‘Your Fantasy.’
Girl Group creates music with playful defiance, brat-pop energy and a feminist ethos. Their journey began at Liverpool house parties, and they continue this grassroots tradition with intimate gigs, club nights, and a growing community of like-minded creatives.
We had a chat with the girls all about the EP, their beginnings and more. Read the full Q&A below.
Hi guys! How are you? For anyone that may be discovering your music here for the first time, please tell us a bit about how the band started, your influences/sound and mission?
“Hey! We’re great! Currently in the car on the way to London blasting Addison Rae’s new album hehe. Well, the band started long after we’d become friends. We met around freshers in our first year at uni and became a friendship group. We were all focussing on our solo projects which were extremely different from one another’s, so it never occurred to us to make music together. Music taste wasn’t something we bonded over so much, but feminism was. We’d often have long rants about the issues that were affecting us, and one day conversation turned to the ‘boys club’ studio culture we’d noticed at our uni. Groups of boys would often go to the studio to collaborate and we would rarely be asked. If we were, it felt as though it was on a guest-only basis and our input wasn’t necessarily required. So we decided to go to the studio and make our own little club. This set our mission in place very early on: we wanted to create a space where women could gather, share ideas and feel safe to explore their creativity. It’s difficult to do in music. When you feel lucky to have been granted a place, you have to push to be taken seriously, and so it’s hard to feel comfortable and experiment. Also, there are so many songs that have been touched only by men, SO few by women. We decided to prioritise women in every step of our creative process, from photographers to video directors to mix and mastering engineers.
“As I said, we didn’t have much in common musically… until Wet Leg. When Wet Leg’s album came out, we all loved it so it felt natural to go take inspiration from them for our first single, Life Is Dumb. This led to us finding other artists we agreed on and since then, we’ve taken influence from biig piig, Charli XCX, PinkPantheress, Lily Allen and Julia Jacklin.”
You’ve just released your debut EP Think They’re Looking, Let’s Perform. What can you tell us about the record? What do you hope fans/listeners take away from it?
“We wrote most of it over the course of being at uni, so it feels very representative of that time. It covers many different aspects of being a young woman, both positive and negative. We write about going out lots, having fun and our platonic love for each other while also touching on the sexualisation of women and young girls and misogyny directed at female musicians. We also explore different genres and moods within every song. We’d like listeners of this EP firstly to dance and have fun, and for women and people that can relate to the things we’re talking about to feel seen. We’d also love to give people who perhaps aren’t as involved in feminism something to think about.”
Please take us through your songwriting/creative process for TTLLP. What was your favourite part and what did you find most challenging?
“As with starting and completing any creative work, it was filled with ups and downs. One of the highlights was probably recording ‘BFF4EAE’ (this is the friendship one if you couldn’t tell haha). We’d written this beautiful song and wanted to record it in one take, to allow for improvisation but also to preserve the tender feeling it had whenever we sang it. We planned to record it in Katya’s room. Our friend and honorary sixth member who’s also an artist (Josie Oliver) was staying round that weekend, so we recorded it with her, which was just so nice to be able to do and a really special moment.
“The worst part was probably rewriting ‘Man-made Girl Bands’. The song is a sarcastic depiction of the people (and journalists) that hate on female musicians for being “industry plants” – a term that seems to be reserved for women. It was so hard to get the tone of this right. At times we didn’t sound sarcastic, we just sounded mean ha. But after a LOT of revisions, we got there and now we love it.
You have some festival appearances coming up this summer. What can we expect from a Girl Group show? How do you want gig-goers to feel after experiencing you perform live?
“Yessssss we do! We put a lot into our gigs. We try to create something of a world for the audience to enter. This includes props, highly thought-out outfits, choreography… we’d even go as far as to say characters.
“Hmmm… we would say to expect to be thoroughly entertained, stunned, empowered, excited, confused, sick and aroused. I’d also say to expect the overwhelming urge to download our EP;)”
Finally, what does the remainder of this year and beyond hold for Girl Group? Are you working on any more new music? What are your goals for the future?
“We’re going to be celebrating the release of TTLLP in Liverpool, where we’re based, by holding a birthday party for her:) We also hope to do more events like the house party we had back in March in which we put on a gig with local DJs and artists that we love. We’ll also be doing lots more gigs and festivals. We are currently working on the next project, which has been really exciting!
“We have a lot of goals for the future. We’d love to create more of a community in the spaces we inhabit, where women and non-binary people can meet and connect with one another. We have a dream of making a platform where creatives can find each other, and create the kind of inclusive working environment that we’ve found to be so special. Also supporting Charli XCX would be sick xxx”
