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Marie Ulven, known by her stage name girl in red, sits down with Teen Vogue over Zoom — the camera off, just as she’s done in other interviews — from her home country of Norway. She’s just finished recording a performance for an award show, and there’s some rustling around in the background. She’s putting on a jacket. She’s a little breathless. “This is going to be a bit of a girl on the move type of interview,” she warns, “but that's alright.”
A few minutes later, more rustling. “Sorry. My friend is trying to put a pizza box in the car and I was like, ‘That's not going to work out,’” she says flatly. But anyway, back to the topic at hand: concrete.
The 22-year-old singer-songwriter recently promoted her album if i could make it go quiet with a short Spotify RADAR documentary. In it, she moves excitedly through her Oslo apartment, picking up random objects — a serotonin molecule, a vintage metronome, a basketball she’s learning to spin on her finger, a book titled Concrete Oslo. (“I’m obsessed with concrete,” she exclaims, eyes bright, in the doc.)
Across more than 500 pages, Concrete Oslo highlights the capital city’s reinforced concrete buildings built between the 1940s to the 1980s. Marie became interested in brutalism last year, that “rough, concrete-y, rocky architecture I just really vibe with.” Though she tells Teen Vogue that if i could make it go quiet maybe wasn’t directly influenced by the concept of harsh, solid concrete design, it’s not not influenced by that. “Getting inspired by things like architecture and furniture design… I think this is all a part of me growing as a person. All this has definitely fed into the album in a way, you know what I mean?”
Plus, girl in red has a way with words that can seem, well, brutal. While she can make her voice sound airy and light, her sweet spot is a sort of blunt roughness that on the album manifests in spoken word, rap-inspired cadences, with lyrics that spit and shock. “I’m not upset, I’m f*cking pissed,” she daggers on “Did You Come?" And on “hornylovesickness,” she plaintively admits, “I treated you like trash, and you deserve more than that.”
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Marie, 22, grew up in Horten, a port town of nearly 27,000 people that’s a little over an hour’s drive from Oslo. As a kid, her bedroom was covered in The Simpsons and Spongebob Squarepants posters, before she graduated to the vinyl records that adorned her walls. Her music found an invested fanbase when she was in high school, and she went on to study songwriting and production at Westerdals Oslo School of Arts, Communication and Technology. But soon, the balance between her budding career and her schooling became difficult to find; she dropped out in 2019 to build girl in red on her own terms.
After consistently releasing hits like “we fell in love in october” and “i wanna be your girlfriend” since 2018, she finally set out to make a full album. She found the process different, more difficult and intense. With singles, you can create on bursts of inspiration alone — with an album, it’s a long game. “I had to work on songs that I really didn't want to work on,” Marie says. “I was just like, ‘I've been working on this for so long. I'm not inspired right now at all.’”
She recorded the album in the picturesque city of Bergen with producer Matias Tellez, which is where she spent the majority of 2020. The distance from both home and touring travel seems to have allowed her to capture feelings from both, whether it’s a lonely New York City hotel room or her Oslo apartment.
“Apartment 402” captures the latter. It’s a gut-punch of a song, a complex world of experiences and emotions distilled down to her bedroom. The home is a center for her, a place where the best and worst moments of life are lived. It’s why she’s concerned with creating safe feelings for herself, in the form of the instruments, books, and knick-knacks that decorate her space. “It’s been a place I've hated and it's been a place I've loved, and it's been a place where I've been able to reflect on everything that's been happening mentally and in my life,” she says. It’s the place where you lay on the floor and aren’t sure you can get up. The place where light can come in too, through the cracks in the wall. “I could die here and nobody would know,” the lyrics go. “I've been through hell, but I’m on my way out.”
It’s this willingness to reckon with inexplicable sadness, heightened emotion, and the moving states of her mental health on a given day that make a signature girl in red song. “Rue,” a 2020 single that’s on the album, was inspired by Zendaya’s character in Euphoria. In her, Marie found a kindred spirit of sorts, in the sense that they both have things they’re running from. The Finneas-produced “Serotonin” examines how terrified she is of her intrusive thoughts, the corners of her mind. So she names them, taking away their power.
That vulnerability feels obvious to her — why hide what we all feel? “I have this theory that you can't expose a human being emotionally because we have the same emotions,” Marie says. “I can't expose myself by saying, ‘Wow, I have intrusive thoughts.’ I just want to make something that matters, something that I gravitate towards, which is honesty and stuff that feels real.”
She’s part of a growing contingent of songwriters — Olivia Rodrigo and Conan Gray, for example — whose primary influence is Taylor Swift, the natural end result of listening to her albums on a loop as a teenager. On the day we chat, Taylor has just dropped Fearless (Taylor’s Version), which Marie is excited to delve into. She cites Taylor’s focus on the shape of words, and how they feed into her melodies, as inspirations in her work. She’s a fan of Olivia’s too (“'Deja vu', great song,” she says) and is interested in the way Taylor’s influence manifests in each artist’s work.
“I feel like I can hear that in both Conan and Olivia’s songwriting, that there's this melodic and rhythmic and lyric thing that just feels so available and so easy to the ears,” Marie says. “It's just really great songwriting.”
During the pandemic, girl in red became synonymous with a now-established internet phenomenon: “do you listen to girl in red?” Across TikToks and tweets, it became a coded way to ask if someone is queer, like Marie is — the phrase solidified in singer-songwriter Haley Margo’s song of the same name. For Marie, it’s cool that something about her music broke through a crowded pop culture landscape, and that people can use the code as a way of staying safe. “You either know what it means or you don't, and if you know, you did something right, I guess,” she says.
The virality of the phrase led to more girl in red fans, and as a result, more social media scrutiny on Marie, who was active on Twitter. Last October, she released a Notes App statement after people accused her of being lesbophobic following an out-of-context interview quote. The note clarified that she actually said “lesbian” is not a word she uses to identify herself, preferring “queer or gay.” But it was indicative of the way misunderstandings can spread quickly and easily on the platform.
“I love the internet and I hate the internet, and I have a bunch of friends who have been going through the same things and I've been able to call them and be like, ‘Oh my God, what is happening?’” Marie says. “It's just a really uncomfortable experience. I'm not going to lie. I've had friends be like, ‘Yeah, I never want to go on social media again. And I'm like, ‘It's going to pass, honey.’ Because it's just a weird thing.
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“But it also feels like a tiny storm that flies away eventually. And you’ve gotta keep living because at the end of the day, you know who you are and what you stand for, and you’ve just gotta keep doing that stuff.”
Now, she’s looking forward to the return of live shows — she was supposed to see Taylor’s now-cancelled Lover Fest with her mom last year — and is envisioning what her own shows will feel like. “You Stupid B*tch” is one she’s particularly excited to perform, preferably in a setting where she can go full mosh pit, rock ‘n roll energy that will “go so hard live.” It’ll be an exhale, a release of two years worth of pent-up emotion.
And that will make the softer moments hit harder, too. If i could make it go quiet ends on the instrumental track, “it would feel like this,” a completion of the title phrase. Through soft piano, the opposite of the blunt, brutal lines elsewhere on the album, girl in red creates the room she’d like to live in. The one where the light is coming in.
“This is the track where I fall behind that quietness, and I end up in that beautiful place of just being okay and learning how to deal with everything… all these thoughts and feelings that are so intense that they just take over your entire mind and body," she says. "It just sounds to me like I'm okay.”
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