Girl Group - Think They’re Looking, Let's Perform EP (2025)

Girl Group, as the name suggests, is a girl group in the same tradition established by the Spice Girls—five ambitious young women, one laser-focused mission—albeit one that runs their self-contained, self-produced outfit on the kind of DIY operating system more common to the indie scene than mainstream pop. For Yorkshire-born Lily Christlow and Norwegians Katya Birkeland, Maria Tollisen, Mia Halvorsen, and Thea Gundersen, who bonded as friends (and later, housemates) while studying at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, this hands-on approach to writing, recording, and marketing is foundational to their ethos. “That’s where a lot of the feminism lies,” Tollisen tells Apple Music. “In how it’s made and why it’s made.”

The group’s debut EP, Think They’re Looking, Let’s Perform, was made experimentally over the course of two years with Tollisen overseeing production, merging five distinct, individual schools of musical influence—neo-soul, post-punk, ’60s folk classics, unabashed pop, and haunting, dramatic singer-songwriters—into the sparkling, slightly chaotic exuberance that has become characteristic of their sound. As for the “why,” Christlow says, “I hope that people, especially young women, who feel like they resonate with what we’re saying get a sense of fun and something that can make them feel confident, while also providing some food for thought about the issues that we’re talking about.” Read on to find out more about each track on Girl Group’s debut EP, in their own words.