GIRLBAND! release new single “All My Friends”, the latest taste of their forthcoming self-titled debut album, out 13th November. Their most personal song to date, the track confronts the loneliness, mental health struggles and quiet despair that can exist beneath the surface of a life that looks perfectly fine from the outside, shining a light on the difficult realities GIRLBAND! have always been unafraid to explore.
“Probably the hardest song on the record for me to talk about,” says Georgie (vocals and guitar), “It’s incredibly close and personal, because the lyrics are essentially me talking to myself… It’s not an easy song, but I’m really proud that it exists."
There’s a Radiohead-esque feeling to the song as Georgie explains it was written at a time when everything felt like it was falling apart behind closed doors. “All My Friends” captures the experience of keeping up appearances while struggling to make sense of what’s happening inside your own head. Surrounded by the noise of city life, working long hours, partying and constantly being around people, vocalist Georgie found herself feeling increasingly isolated, questioning who their friends really were and struggling to admit just how much they were hurting.
“I was in a real state of despair when I wrote this and, at the time, nobody really knew. I was still going out, having fun, working, drinking, being the person I thought everyone expected me to be all while feeling like I was hurting myself deeper underneath it all. I felt completely hollow and incredibly lonely in the middle of everything.”
The song came together in the immediate aftermath of a moment of realisation: that things had reached a point where they could no longer be ignored. After reaching out to her girlfriend for help, the experience that followed became the catalyst for the track. What emerged was an attempt to understand the thoughts and feelings that had been building beneath the surface, turning an intensely personal moment into something others might recognise in themselves. It’s a reminder that struggling isn't always visible, that loneliness can exist even when you're surrounded by people, and that sometimes the hardest thing to do is admit you're not okay.
“The lyric is really just me trying to make sense of what was happening in my own head. There’s a theme that runs quite subtly through the whole album about trying to live your life when the world around you can feel completely wrong, and I think this is probably the darkest expression of that.”
That honesty sits at the heart of GIRLBAND!’s forthcoming debut. Written in real time while touring, making friends, falling in and out of love and figuring out what the hell they’re doing, the self-titled record takes place in the messy reality of being a young woman now. Love, sex, friendship, heartbreak, money, queerness, womanhood and everything in between sit alongside the euphoria of nights out and the inevitable comedown that follows. Across the album, GIRLBAND! make space for the complicated, contradictory and often uncomfortable parts of being alive, giving a voice to experiences that can be difficult to articulate but impossible to ignore.
