INTERVIEW: girli on her single 'Crush Me Up' and her upcoming Matriarchy tour of Australia: "Matriarchy is a place where people who don't feel this current society is friendly to them can be safe."

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: March 27 2024

The UK’s girli (real name Milly Toomey) is an artist who instinctively knows how to create music that is nothing short of a burst of joy. Delicious synth-electro-pop soundscapes with lyrics that are cutting, relatable and raw, you can both dance your night away, or cry your heart out to her songs.

She has just released her new single ‘Crush Me Up’, a electronic dance track that sees girli explore the stages of a crush which can eventually turn into an obsession: ‘Crush me up / Take too much / I don’t care.”

‘A song about crushing so hard on someone it’s like the image of them is playing on an infinite loop on a TV inside your head,” girli says. “But it’s a nice kind of crush; a required one, you equally thirst for each other. It’s a jump up and down in your room at a sleepover with your friends and blush red when you talk about them kinda crush. I wrote this about my girlfriend when we first met. Crush me up (like I’m a drug) and take all of me because I want all of you.”

girli first released music in 2015 with the wonderfully named single ‘So You Think You Can Fuck With Me Do Ya’ and in the intervening 10 years her music has explored feminism, sexuality, identity and mental health. 2016’s single ‘Girls Get Angry Too’ is a feminist and gender identity rap anthem which takes aim at the damaging cliches society forces on women and also children: ‘Hyper masculinity / Drowning the vicinity
Weakness is just another word for femininity…What's a girl, what's a boy? Why are there gender sections for toys?’ 2018’s ‘Young’ is a new wave inflected, heavy electro track, while last year’s ‘Cheap Love’ (written with songwriting legend Cathy Dennis) is a glorious, summery pop track with addictive melodies. ‘Nothing Hurts Like A Girl’, released in November, is a melancholic ‘dance cry’ electro banger which sits alongside the best Scandipop. girli sings of the delights of love but then the realisation that the harder you fall, the worse it will hurt when it ends: “But then my heart brеaks harder / I'm crying in the shower / Cause nothing feels quite like her / Nothing hurts like a girl.”

‘Crush Me Up’ will be featured on girli’s second album Matriarchy, which will be released on 17 May, which will be available on black vinyl LP, picture CD pink cassette tape and an exclusive pink marble vinyl. Just before the album is released, girli will arrive in Australia to perform shows in Perth, Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Tickets are on sale now.

girli is a truly exciting and mesmerising artist whose music will quickly become the soundtrack to your life. We recently caught up with her to chat all about her music and upcoming Australian tour.

Hi girli it’s so lovely to catch up with you today, particularly because I've just been dancing around my house to ‘Crush Me Up’ which I’m very excited about. How are things with you?
Good! I feel like I've been waiting for this year for my whole career. I'm really stoked, I feel in a good spot and this album is something I've been wanting to make for a long time and didn't really have the sense of self to make it until the last year or so. I'm loving all of the touring around this album. I'm very excited to come out to Australia

I like that sentiment. And I mean in order to put out an album called Matriarchy, you’ve gotta have some years behind you, there’s some weight to that word.
Yeah, completely. I didn't think about it like that!

Tell me a little bit about Matriarchy. You’ve said the title song and the name of the album was a redefinition of this already very powerful word. Can you tell us a little bit about how that plays into where you're at as a creative and how this album came together?
Obviously the dictionary definition of matriarchy is a head of state or monarchy who's a woman. I wrote the song ‘Matriarchy’ before I decided that the whole project was going to be called Matriarchy, and when I wrote that song it was about queer women finding solace from the patriarchy and the male gaze in each other's embrace. it was about reclaiming your body and your sexuality and trying to reverse years and years and years of growing up and existing under the patriarchy. But then I thought about the community that I've built with my fans about how that word meant to me a safe space. The idea of ‘matriarchy’ became like a utopia, where anyone who doesn't thrive in the current society that we live in, which is ruled by white cisgendered men can just take a break. And that's come from realising that when I play shows, and I meet my fans, or I chat to them online, people find my music and my shows as somewhere where they can just really be themselves and really let their hair down. A lot of people I think relate to the things I talk about: mental health and queerness and feminism. They really connect with that because they've always felt like outsiders. Matriarchy is a place where people who don't feel like this current society is really friendly to them can be safe.

I love that. I like the way you talk about your fans and there's this very immediate care and connection. You carry a lot of responsibility that you've probably put on yourself, because of the way your music has touched people. Is there a little bit of respite in having your moniker girli? Is there a part of that that's not all of you, and gives you a bit of a break?
Yeah, definitely. There's definitely a separation. There's girli, and there's Millie, Millie slash Amelia. There's certain things that I love doing that I don't necessarily share online. It took me a while to figure out that separation, and I think it came when I realised I don't want to share everything on social media. That's kind of how I find that separation. When I write my songs I'm Millie, and then girli is the version of me that performs those songs and makes the music videos and is like this elevated version. But the songs are all fully me. There's no character there.

I like that, the elevated version that you can toss to the crowd without losing any integrity. You spoke about songwriting, and I wrote down so many lyrics for ‘Crush Me Up’, I don't even know where to start. I love them all. You created this amazing wordplay throughout the whole thing. It's so clever and so funny and just visceral. You've managed to like a song, which is exactly the way you feel when you're just completely obliterated by someone. I love it. Talk to me about this gorgeous song.
Thank you so much. I wrote this song about when I met my girlfriend about a year and a half ago. Since I was a kid I have always been obsessed with romance, romantic films and books and stories. And I was just feeling this overwhelming sense of ‘I can't get this person off my mind, they're eating me up, but in a good way’. Anyone at any age can have a crush and one of the things that stays with you from your teens is that feeling of crazy excitement. I had a lot of fun messing around with the word play, I wanted this song to be really, really fun but some of the lyrics to be kind of gross or intense, because it is this intense feeling. It's definitely a feeling that I felt in a bad way when it's unrequited and you have this crush who don't feel the same way and I can't do anything about it. But in this case, it was I have a crush on someone who has a crush on me back and it's great. It's so intense, but it's amazing.

I wanted it to be a joyous song and I was inspired by a song that was very important to me as a teenager, ‘Closer’ by Tegan and Sara. That song was about having a ginormous crush on someone but it was the first time I'd heard that story from a gay perspective. I was like, ‘wow, this is so cool’ because a lot of the narratives that we hear in songs and films and TV shows about the gay experience is tragedy, or the coming out story, stuff that's very hard hitting. I think it’s important sometimes to have an element of that experience that's just fun and just about having a crush.

Oh, 100%. Or it comes from such a strong social message stance that it almost feels like a public health announcement and it takes all the fun out of it. ‘Responsibly crushing’ on someone!
I know! I wanted people to be like, ‘I don't have to think too hard about this one.’

Alongside this announcement of the Matriarchy album we also got the announcement that you're coming to Australia, which is delightful. This is going to be very exciting. Because your music videos are such a visual feast, can we expect to see any of that in the show as well?
Oh, absolutely! I've had so much fun actually really going in with the art stage dressing on this tour. I wanted to bring to life the album cover on stage and pay homage to the inspirations around all the visuals. I don't want to reveal too much, but there's a lot of picture frames and flowers and it's quite decadent. The main imagery of the album and also a lot of the videos is the idea of this picture frame and that concept is creating your own image and reclaiming it from what other people project onto you. There’s also this idea of the erasure of art and the stories of women from history, LGBTQ+ people from history. The fact that you walk into an art gallery and you're like, ‘where are all the paintings by women of themselves?’ So that’s kind of the theme of the show. I've got loads of pictures from the music video on stage, and there's also this amazing backdrop that was designed by a really cool artist, and she's paying homage to Joan of Arc and Boudica and some cool women from history.

That's beautiful. You said earlier that you needed to get to a certain place, but this has been an album you've always wanted to do. You've been doing your thing for a very long time, and I don't think it's ever easy for soloists in this industry, particularly for young women, because there is always going to be, like ‘oh, you're a bit alternative, let's put you in this box’. Has that been a big move for you as you get to this album, just this real solidifying of strength in yourself as an artist?
Yeah, definitely. I’ve found it really tough in this industry, it's not been an easy ride at all. I definitely have found it difficult that people have never been able to place me in regards to genre, it's like, ‘oh, she's not quite pop enough to be a pop artist, she's not rock enough to be that, she's not alternative enough to be in this category’. I think, funnily enough, it kind of took maybe the world to catch up to the fact that pretty much every artist is now a mix of so many different genres, for it to be easier for me. Which is funny to say, because since I started releasing music, I've seen the music industry, and the way people consume music change drastically. So that's also why now is a good time to have this album and this era.

‘Crush Me Up’ is out now. You can buy and stream here.
Matriarchy will be released on May 17. You can pre-order and pre-save now.
Follow girli on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.

GIRLI MATRIARCHY TOUR 2024
Tickets here
24 April - Perth, The Rechabite
25 April - Brisbane, The Brightside
26 April - Sydney, Oxford Art Factory
27 April - Melbourne, Laundry Bar