girl in red

Norway's Marie Ulven, performing as girl in red, first drew listeners in with intimate bedroom pop that chronicled crushes alongside everyday mental-health challenges. She later increased the sonic scale, incorporating brighter, pop-oriented production while keeping her lyrics direct and her style resistant to easy categorization. At seventeen she broke through after uploading the 2017 single “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend,” then continued issuing candid tracks that steadily grew her streaming numbers and online following. Her debut full-length, if i could make it go quiet, arrived in 2021, peaking at number two in Norway, inside the top ten in both the U.K. and Australia, and registering on the Billboard 200. After supporting Taylor Swift on the opening leg of The Eras Tour in 2023, Ulven delivered her second studio album, I'M DOING IT AGAIN BABY!, the following year; the Columbia release blended her characteristically frank songwriting with dance-rock and restless alt-pop textures.

Raised in Horten, just south of Oslo, Ulven began composing at sixteen in 2015. She introduced girl in red with “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend” in September 2017; NRK Urørt spotlighted the track in February 2018, triggering a sharp rise in streams and social-media attention. By then she had already posted roughly one new song per month, among them February’s “Summer Depression” and June’s “Girls,” both of which accumulated millions of streams before year’s end. Mid-2018 also saw “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend” appear on the GLSEN benefit compilation Pride: A Compilation of LGBTQ Artists alongside MUNA, Cyn, and Superfruit. Around the same period Ulven moved to Oslo for studies while maintaining her output. October 2018 brought the collaborative single “Eleanor and Park” with beabadoobee, followed by the Chapter 1 EP and the non-album track “We Fell in Love in October,” which reached number fourteen on Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart. Chapter 2 surfaced in 2019, and Ulven earned a Spellemann Awards nomination for Newcomer of the Year in 2020.

if i could make it go quiet, helmed by co-producer Matias Tellez, expanded Ulven’s lo-fi origins into a more expansive, instrumentally diverse palette; the set entered the top ten in Norway, the U.K., and Australia and landed in the upper half of the Billboard 200. Among its tracks was “Serotonin,” a Billboard alternative top-twenty hit that carried additional production from Finneas. In 2022 Ulven issued the standalone follow-up “October Passed Me By,” again produced with Aaron Dessner of the National. After her 2023 appearances on The Eras Tour, Ulven reunited with Tellez, bringing heightened assurance shaped by therapy and perspective. The resulting I'M DOING IT AGAIN BABY! threaded isolated piano, abrupt synth bursts, club electronics, and punchy rock into a vivid alt-pop and dance-rock framework, reaching stores in April 2024. Later that year she contributed to A24’s Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense.