When 24-year-old Amelia Toomey, aka girli, was in her teens, the emerging North London-based artist found herself on the cusp of a hit career. More recently, she’s found herself in an identity crisis: “Who am I? That’s a question I’ve been asked since I was 17,” she says. “I don’t have that answer and no one f**king does, which is okay.” Transparency has always been key to girli’s image. “I want people to know that I’m a work in progress,” she says. “As an artist, you’re always expected to be the final version of yourself like this perfect, fully formed and packaged thing, but that’s just not what being human is.”
Pulling on her brewing identity crisis for inspiration, girli is refusing to “choose” between labels, whether that’s genres as an artist on her new EP, or more personally. Tired of walking the line, girli’s call out for change is the ethos that has shaped both her new alt-pop style and musical direction: “The day I wrote ‘I Really F**ked It Up’, I left the studio and had this huge sense of relief. I felt like I’d cracked it in a way and that was just the beginning. I can keep one-upping myself and bettering myself, and I had this big realisation that I wanted a huge change.” Standing out as an individualist who refuses to be boxed in by labels, girli’s new era is an anthem for the misfits and misunderstood. girli’s biggest single to date ‘More Than a Friend’ swirls around emotions of sexual frustration, while ‘I Really F**ked It Up’ surveys the reality of spinning out of control. Drawing on the literary inspiration of American poet Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’, girli hopes her forthcoming EP captures the same notion of self — “I contain multitudes too. I’m so many things at once and that’s the energy I want people to feel when they listen to my music.” Given the vibrant, hook-filled stylings yet to come, girli won’t be waiting long to be heard again.
