“Do you listen to girl in red?”  Yes, I’m aware that joke is dead, but I wanted to use it in this Artist of the Week post to claim victory.  The queer community tried to keep girl in red for themselves but we weren’t having it. Girl in red is for the people.  Marie Ulven is a Norwegian singer-songwriter who has been releasing music under this alias since 2018.  A number of publications have labeled her as “dream pop” but if you listen to her latest release “serotonin,” it sounds more EDM than anything to me. After my first listen, it gave me Alison Wonderland vibes. I say that to try and make the point that every year, it’s becoming more and more antediluvian to try and place bands under a single genre. Girl in red, I feel, fits into that new style of music creators; Some would call it “multi-genre” whereas I would call it “genre-less.”

We at ANCHR were fortunate to catch girl in red at the Iceland Airwaves Music Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland back in 2019.  One of the best parts of the show was that it was put on by KEXP and being live-streamed for the listeners back in Seattle but it kept slipping Ulven’s mind that the performance was being shared live and she would continuously swear during her in-between songs banter with the audience. The KEXP producers would try to get her attention to get her to stop doing that and she would then laugh and unwittingly say “shit, I forgot,” which gave her performance the same endearing relatability as her lyrics. We went into the show really digging a handful of her songs and she did not disappoint when performing them.  “We Fell In Love In October” was a personal favorite and I still can’t kick it. 

My favorite track she released in 2020 was “Midnight Love” and that bop made it onto the track list of her debut album if i could make it go quiet , which comes out April 30, 2021, giving us something to look forward to.

Pre-order if i could make it go quiet  here, and listen to “serotonin” below.