Girl Group, as the name suggests, is a girl group in the same tradition established by the Spice Girls—five ambitious young women, one laser-focused mission—albeit one that runs their self-contained, self-produced outfit on the kind of DIY operating system more common to the indie scene than mainstream pop. For Yorkshire-born Lily Christlow and Norwegians Katya Birkeland, Maria Tollisen, Mia Halvorsen, and Thea Gundersen, who bonded as friends (and later, housemates) while studying at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, this hands-on approach to writing, recording, and marketing is foundational to their ethos. “That’s where a lot of the feminism lies,” Tollisen tells Apple Music. “In how it’s made and why it’s made.” The group’s debut EP, Think They’re Looking, Let’s Perform, was made experimentally over the course of two years with Tollisen overseeing production, merging five distinct, individual schools of musical influence—neo-soul, post-punk, ’60s folk classics, unabashed pop, and haunting, dramatic singer-songwriters—into the sparkling, slightly chaotic exuberance that has become characteristic of their sound. As for the “why,” Christlow says, “I hope that people, especially young women, who feel like they resonate with what we’re saying get a sense of fun and something that can make them feel confident, while also providing some food for thought about the issues that we’re talking about.” Read on to find out more about each track on Girl Group’s debut EP, in their own words. “Flink Pike” Katya Birkeland: “I started this one. It’s been different for each song, [but] it tends to be one or two people starting some sort of idea and bringing it to the group, and then we tend to discuss quite a lot what we want the song to be in every aspect of it—just musically and lyrically, and what kind of a thing we want to make. Then Maria finalizes it production-wise.” Thea Gundersen: “‘Flink Pike’ is a Norwegian term that means, directly translated ‘good girl’ and it’s about a Norwegian kind of way of being, which is ‘good girl syndrome.’” Mia Halvorsen: “It’s actually a psychological diagnosis.” “Yay! Saturday” Lily Christlow: “We started this one in the summer of 2023. We had just moved into our new house—me and Maria got there first—and it was before uni started again so we were just going out a lot and it was really fun. That’s all we had to do.” Maria Tollisen: “I think I had just broken up with my boyfriend. Two weeks straight, I was just going out and going to the same place. Maybe one of the most important places throughout my uni experience. We just wanted to write something that celebrates going out with women.” “Your Fantasy” KB: “This started with me and Thea as a songwriting task for uni which was like, use a song as inspiration and try and do what they’re doing. So we took ‘Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)’ by Katy Perry and we were like, ‘OK, let’s make a pop banger.’ We’ve always wanted to write about over-sexualization of girls and the male fantasy of a girls’ sleepover, so we made a super poppy, megapop song. Then we were like, ‘This slaps and the lyrics are cool,’ so we brought it to the group and said, ‘OK, how do we make this Girl Group?’” TG: “It was a very fun song to show to our songwriting teacher, too, to be fair. He was just sat there like, ‘This is spicy, isn’t it?’” “Man-Made Girl Bands” LC: “I read an article when I was researching for an essay I was doing for uni and it was really slagging off some women bands who were doing really well at the time. It was throwing the ‘industry plant’ thing in there and it was really questioning their authenticity. It was really putting all their success on these faceless men, the record labels, and all this kind of thing. It was quite frustrating to read. Especially because it was a woman journalist, who was attempting to present it from a feminist perspective.” MH: “I think reading that just woke up so much in us, being in a music uni and reading about the industry and how audiences consume and perceive music. We’ve talked more and more about how the whole ‘industry plant’ thing is so misogynistic, because it’s just thrown at women. The audience has such an inherent skepticism towards women that you just don’t see and [they’re] a lot more open-minded when talking about men.” LC: “It’s the most post-punk influenced track on the EP, which was really interesting through the lens of Girl Group. It took a lot of rewriting. We changed it so much because we really wanted to get the perspective right and not sound like we were slating these women ourselves, because it’s a very sarcastic kind of song.” “Shut Your Mouth (Sometimes)” MT: “Feminism and girlhood is at the center of all our lyrics but we’d not written something that was just flat-out frustration, so we were just sat talking about moments in our lives that have made us feel like we’ve wanted to tell someone to shut up.” LC: “Among them is not being taken seriously in a band setting…” MT: “Being on the dance floor and having a boy not leave you alone…” MH: “How the patriarchy affects the straight dating scene and the power imbalances that are there. All of these different verses drew on different experiences of frustration. We want to be playful and have fun with it. A lot of feminism is very heavy—rightly so—but we wanted to make it fun.” TG: “The contrast of the dark and making it like you can laugh about it and have a dance about it because that’s how you cope.” “BFF4EAE” KB: “[UK singer-songwriter] Josie Oliver is our best friend, she is our guardian angel, she is our favorite. She’s a great artist. Everyone should listen to Josie Oliver. She happened to be in our house the day that we were recording this song and it just felt really right to have her on it. There’s a lot of ‘oooohs’ and ‘ahhhhs’ and harmonies and choir bits where we’re just improvising it, so it was really easy to just have her jump on.” TG: “It doesn’t have to be perfect because it’s just raw and vulnerable and what it is supposed to be.” Mia: “Female friendships are often seen as quite toxic and mean-girl and competitive so for us it’s been important to highlight the strength of that and how that can also guide you in what you deserve and what you should have in your life. It’s just a love song to each other.”