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Alt-pop agitator girli describes her upcoming album ‘Nothing Hurts Like a Girl’ as her most “reflective” and “vulnerable” body of work yet. “It’s about the pain of being in queer relationships and getting hurt by a girl, but also the pain of being a woman and figuring out who you are,” says the musician also known as Milly Toomey. This personal growth has coincided with an evolution in how girli approaches her artistry. When she broke through seven years ago with edgy electro gems like ‘Girls Get Angry Too’, she relished being combative. “Initially I was pissed off about a lot of things and I just wanted to get them out,” she says. “But now, writing songs is like therapy for me – it’s about processing things I’ve gone through and how they shaped me as a person.”
Born and raised in north London, girli started out singing in bands, but soon realised she was “too much of a control freak” not to go solo. She adopted her stage name and signature pink hair during this period as a way of “weaponising everything that was being used against me”. Right from the start, girli took pride in being slyly subversive. “The word ‘girly’ has so much stigma attached to it because it’s often used to belittle femininity,” she explains. “I wanted to take that word and turn it into something powerful, and I changed the ‘y’ to an ‘i’ so people would be able to find my music on Google.”
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