There’s a look on Sissy Spacek’s face near the end of the haunting prom scene in 1976’s Carrie that’s burned in my mind, where the protagonist calmly steps down from the stage covered in pig’s blood. Carrie’s eyes are a thousand miles wide and unflinching, slowly surveying the gymnasium she’s telepathically set ablaze and her fleeing tormentors, scattering to no avail. Princess Nokia evokes this image on the first full track of her latest album, Girls, as she launches into a deadpan diatribe against her abusers and the crushing effects of the patriarchy on women, all while draping herself in the imagery of Greek mythical macabre and Santeria. One can almost picture her mirroring Spacek’s startling expression as she drills into her targets from the booth. It kicks off a whiplash assembly of songs that touch on the titular topic with varying degrees of focus and success, seemingly asking: Who’s got time for subtlety these days?
In the interim between Nokia’s 2023 release i love you but this is goodbye and Girls, the New York native became enamored of the work of David Lynch, especially the cult phenomenon Twin Peaks and the spirit of its protagonist, Laura Palmer. In homage, she’s named the opener “Blue Velvet.” Overt lyrical allusions aside (“I've been through too much, babe, I feel like Laura Palmer/I've been a statistic, and every one ignored me,” she spits with calm fury), the inspiration she gleaned from Lynch’s thematic obessions is potent in Girls’ conceptual throughline. Written over the span of a year, it’s an album that admonishes the cruelty shown towards women before turning right around to tout belief in the power of love and the beauty of femininity (in any form), using any heavy-handed signifier that it can to drive the point home. Take the genre juxtaposition crafted by Nokia and production duo Joey Wunsch and Al von Staats: blaring ’80s synths on the anthemic, tonally brutal “Medusa” rub up against the soothing ocean waves swirling in the background of “Period Blood,” to the point that it almost feels like a natural come down.
The constant oscillation between tenors over the album’s 12 tracks creates a battle to maintain lyrical focus and intensity, which Nokia handles to mixed success. She’s at her best when she locks into the understated flow rooted in the tradition of her city’s boom-bap rap that barely rises above the whisper: “I'm drinking blood in the mountain, I got the fountain of youth/I'm scaring men off with rumors, can't tell the lies from the truth,” she raps along ghostly shrieks and pounding drums on “Blue Velvet.” But production avenues that sound like demos jacked from other artists’ hard drives diminishes some tracks’ impact, especially when paired with writing that doesn’t reach past the surface. “Drop Dead Gorgeous” lands like a Charli XCX bootleg where the BPM doesn’t reach the threshold to become the banger that it wants to be, and her musings feel like they should be backing a TikTok edit of a Bodies Bodies Bodies fan-cam. If you close your eyes, you could trick yourself into thinking the Lindsey Stirling-assisted “Pink Bronco” is a Lana Del Rey cut, where Nokia contorts her voice to match Lana’s ethereal register while attempting to subvert the Americana aesthetic with yearning for solitude and self-love. She conjures images of packing a suitcase and never looking back, dropping references to green juice and white picket fences, almost making you wonder if she’s just saying things because they sound idyllic.
But there are enough moments where the enthralling production overpowers the more cliché leanings. “Matcha Cherry” is quite lush, with layered strings swirling underneath as her voice crescendos to the refrain, “I'm in love with her, see myself in her, I think I know that, girl.” The switch between the murkiness and blown-out bassline helps “Gossip Girl” leap into “club hit” territory, giving the satirical lyrical tone a bit more oomph on the back of Tenebrae-like synths. But Nokia’s most incisive writing occurs when she takes aim at a particular target—perceived contradictions be damned. She has zero qualms about wielding equal vitriol for all her enemies, regardless of gender: “You're male-centered and you make bad decisions/Bird bitches all bread, no chicken,” she spits on “Phoebe Philo,” cutting through the fat to get to the crux of the problem with a particular type of woman. She’s called Girls as a wake-up call to other women to center their comfort and care; everything else comes second. She makes that clear from “Blue Velvet”’s first lines: “Girlhood is a spectrum, pretty is destruction/I just fell from grace, and I made it into something.” That grave urgency isn’t always maintained throughout Girls’ runtime, but Nokia never lets you doubt her intention for a second.
