The 22-year-old pop songwriter’s debut captures the onslaught of young-adult emotion, longing for a state of being where noise and confusion are replaced by certainty and clarity.
Afew years ago, a Norwegian teenager named Marie Ulven ran into a problem: She fell in love with a friend. Ulven, who had picked up the guitar a few years prior, naturally decided to write a song about it. “i wanna be your girlfriend,” Ulven’s first single under the name girl in red, bristles with self-confidence and desire. “I don’t wanna be your friend, I wanna kiss your lips,” she sang with a lovesick warble and a hearty strum. In the end, the romance was unrequited and the track’s Bandcamp page offers a word to the wise: “don’t fall in love with a straight girl.”
After Ulven uploaded “i wanna be your girlfriend” to the internet in 2018, she developed a loyal following who were drawn to her honesty about queerness, depression, and anxiety. If these topics were once seen as taboo, Ulven approached them as unexceptional. “I’m just out here being a [expletive] normal human being, falling in love and writing a song about it, just like that other straight girl writing a song about love,” she explained to The New York Times. The phrase “Do you listen to Girl in Red” even became a code that helped queer TikTokers find community.
girl in red’s full-length debut, if i could make it go quiet, continues down this path of candor and self-examination. But Ulven, now 22, has moved away from the lo-fi indie pop that defined her early recordings to play with a wider palette. Like Billie Eilish’s 2019 debut, if i could make it go quiet boasts a refreshingly short credits list. Ulven is the sole songwriter and she co-produced every track alongside Matias Téllez; Eilish’s older brother Finneas is the only guest. Rather than signing to a major label, Ulven released the album through AWAL, a distribution service that allows artists to retain ownership of their masters (the company was recently acquired by Sony).
if i could make it go quiet longs for a state of being where the noise and confusion clogging Ulven’s head and heart are replaced by certainty and clarity. But in reality, her self-destructive thoughts bubble beneath the surface until they combust. On opener “Serotonin,” Ulven reels off a list of uncontrollable impulses and violent intrusive thoughts, “Like cutting my hands off/Like jumping in front of a bus.” The production, courtesy of Finneas, is maximalist, throwing together blown-out guitars, hyperspeed drums, and EDM drops; Ulven speak-raps a verse before her words dissolve into gibberish. This barrage is borderline aggravating—but to be a teenager, which Ulven was when she started creating these songs, is to feel everything at once, and “Serotonin” deftly captures that sensory overload. At the chorus, when Ulven identifies her problem as a chemical imbalance, the song bursts into clarity.
Ulven spends a good chunk of if i could make it go quiet digging into relationships, and all the ways she inflicts and absorbs damage. “Did You Come?” borrows “Serotonin”’s riff as it seethes with infidelity and betrayal. “Was she good?/Just what you liked?/Did you come?/How many times?/Tell the truth,” she demands, before thinking better of it: “Wait, never mind.” “You Stupid Bitch”—here a term of endearment—is a mosh pit-ready plea for someone to recognize their own self-worth, while the sophistipop track “Midnight Love” takes the perspective of a long-exploited lover finally standing up for herself. On the chipper piano number “hornylovesickmess,” Ulven gazes at her own face on a billboard in Times Square and ponders how quickly her life has changed.
The album’s first half leans on pop-punk angst, but it soon opens up to reveal a softer side, with sparse R&B production. “Rue,” a tribute of sorts to the Euphoria character who struggles with drug addiction and her mental health, arrives from the bottom of a depressive abyss. As she acknowledges the loved ones who have patiently cared for her, she chooses to fight her way towards a healthier state. “Apartment 402,” which embraces softly rippling synths, is cut with an image of evocative stillness: a despondent Ulven on the floor of her bedroom, at eye level with specks of dust illuminated by sunlight. Though Ulven’s production acumen is impressive, it sometimes feels as if these flourishes are embellishing one-note ideas.
While if i could make it go quiet is an occasionally uneven listen, it’s a strong declaration of conviction. Although Ulven is still fine-tuning her approach, her eagerness to explore hints at promising potential. In the album’s final moments, Ulven seems to finally tamp down all her inner noise and find some levity. On “I’ll Call You Mine,” she illustrates a freewheeling vision of joy: speeding around in a car, fits of giggles in the warmth of summer, allowing herself to be open to happiness. It’s a nice daydream, Ulven acknowledges, one that is “too good to last.” But it’s a place that she can hold in her heart and return to in the darkest of times.
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