Is This It?: Making Music in the Year of the Girl

As the Biblical quote goes, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things.” That is… unless you (or someone you love) took part in the much talked about “Year of the Girl” in 2023, an era defined by its penchant for bows, Barbie, girl dinner and hot girl walks. The spirit of the girl also unsurprisingly trickled into some of the year’s biggest album releases, present in the call-out of toxic masculinity over guitars on Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS or in the creation story of boygenius’ instant indie rock classic the record, the manifestation of three women pouring their visceral singular songwriting into a collaborative effort. That thread has continued so far this year, tangible in the romantic folklore fantasy of Katy Kirby’s Blue Raspberry or the exploration of grief outlining feminist foremothers on Sleater-Kinney’s latest release, Little Rope.

There’s been a lot of speculation over what pushed us into the Year of the Girl, and whether it was incited by a desire for childlike freedom and a fear of the constraints of adulthood. An NPR conversation between All Things Considered host Juana Summers and writer Isabel Cristo pointed to unemployment, rising financial woes and an ever-increasing cost of living as the reasons those identifying as women are turning towards petulant and prepubescent ways. “I think anyone who has been plugged in at all this year knows exactly what’s so uninviting about being an adult woman in the year 2023,” Cristo said, before pointing to the Dobbs v. Jackson landmark decision that the Constitution of the United States does not confer a right to abortion, calling the set back for women’s right another example of our “bleak political landscape.”

Call it superficial or just plain immature, but it doesn’t take girl math to see why feelings of despair and loss of control add up to an urge to return to innocence. It’s why I found myself in a Barbie display case, wearing a blush mini dress on the day of the film’s premiere. It’s likely the reason I wore a layered tutu to watch Taylor Swift sing about fairytale endings during her Eras Tour. But, looking back on the prevalence of girlhood last year, it hasn’t been all Mary Janes and butterflies, but a (sometimes) reckless abandonment of the full view of womanhood—one that comes in shapes and sizes that don’t always fit into magenta boxes. Speaking to musicians, the utmost reflectors of shifting culture, I asked their beliefs on the creative impact of the year of the girl. Are we heading somewhere more sinister than just a reliance on making a meal that mirrors what you used to eat as an after school snack?

“Every year I find our culture bringing itself back further and further into the freeness of girl youth,” Sarah Kinsley told us. The singer/songwriter, known for her wall of sound building, romantic and glittery viral track “The King,” sees the draw of girlhood but also sees it as limiting. “I wonder if wearing the bows, indulging in coquette sweetness is a way of reclaiming a fantasy of girlhood. But the ‘girlness’ of the year does, as most mainstream things do, fall short of what it claims to represent: a depth to what girlhood truly is or what feminism asserts as a whole.” If you’ve seen Kinsley live and glance up at the right moment, you may confuse her for a bundle of delicate white cloth as she dances in decadent dresses, leaning into the full breadth of her feminine existence. “I wear beautiful bowed flowing dresses on stage when I perform much more so than I would ever attempt in real life,” she continued. “This is a direct choice of my performance of girlhood. We choose undeniable, moving, free-flowing girlhood because we can, as a response—perhaps to the monstrosities of our governments or because of the furthering divide between the realities that men set forth for women and the ideals of life created by women themselves.”

Last year, Kinsley released Ascension, an EP she said is “about this unknown, ethereal place,” adding that the world it conveys is an “eternal paradise.” It’s not far off from the femme-Peter-Pan quest to never grow up. “My music has always been something that resonates deeply with young women and I feel a very potent responsibility to portray myself as a reflection of them,” Kinsley said when I asked if her creativity has been touched by the year of the girl. “I see these young women at the shows and I want to make them dance and scream and release this wildness that I feel so keenly. I want it to inspire living emblematically with love and unbridled energy and insanity. It’s a projection of my own ‘girl’ I suppose.”

When asked her opinion on the Year of the Girl, indie punk pioneer Fefe Dobson was succinct in her response. “It’s about time!” It’s a fair response, too, when you consider that it was two decades ago that Dobson shared her Platinum-certified self-titled debut album, pushing tracks like the unbridled “Take Me Away” to the charts and pushing me to dance with reckless abandon in my teenage bedroom, thrilled there was a Black woman like me making the music I loved. “There was that one incredibly powerful scene in the Barbie movie where Rhea Perlman’s character said, ‘We mothers stand still, so our daughters can look back to see how far they’ve come.’ The ‘Year of the Girl’ is a celebration of just that,” Dobson continued. “It’s about reflecting on how far we’ve come but also in the year ahead it’s about reaching back for our mothers who made it possible for us to make these strides and acknowledging the barriers they’ve broken through for us.”

For Dobson, who released her new dizzying, electric and deeply felt album EMOTIONAL SICKNESS last year, “the huge wave of feminism” has rippling perks for those inspired by it. “When you have two of the top females [Taylor Swift and Beyoncé] in music headlining some of the highest-grossing world tours of all time, it’s refreshing to see the media actually highlight these successes instead of pitting them against one another or finding a way to dig at their relationships, weight or mental state,” Dobson explained. “I also think it was incredibly powerful that Britney Spears was willing to share her story through her memoir. It was such a rush to see her as a woman take back her control!”

Dobson, who has talked about her struggle to create rock and pop music in an industry that couldn’t seem to place her looks with her voice (one label referred to her as “Brandy Spears”), emphasizes that embracing the Year of the Girl also means paying it forward. Despite wrestling to find a just place in the industry, Dobson has thrived and survived, with acts like Willow Smith, SZA and Olivia Rodrigo (and writers like me) acknowledging her as an influence.

“I always write music from the perspective of a woman—a woman in love, a woman of color, a woman who has struggled and works to overcome,” Dobson said when asked how 2023 has impacted her work. “My new album, EMOTION SICKNESS, really articulates that message. It’s a liberation of feelings that I’ve been working through. The good, the bad and the ugly.” Dobson is also taking an entire female band on the road to tour this album, something she wouldn’t have thought to do two decades ago. “In my early years, I wanted to keep up with the boys and show them I could rock just as hard, if not more. Now, I’ve got beautiful, talented and intelligent women sharing the stage with me and I’m so grateful for that.”

As far as crystal balls are concerned, Dobson told us that she can only see this adoration for femininity working out for the good of all those involved. “I would hope that there’s even more of a reason and a runway for women to work with other women, both creatively and collaboratively,” she said. “Women really can do it all and kick ass at it! The lines that were once drawn in the sand have now been slowly washed away. Look at the Grammys, for example—six of the seven nominees for Record of the Year are female artists or bands, and seven of the eight nominees are female for Album of the Year. This is incredible!” Just a week after Dobson shared these thoughts, we watched women sweep the Grammy’s biggest categories in historical feats that saw Paramore become the first female-fronted band to win Best Rock Album and boygenius’ gathering up the most nominations in rock categories, leaving the ceremony with wins for Best Alternative Music Album and Best Rock Performance.

New York City collective MICHELLE—made up of Sofia D’Angelo, Julian Kaufman, Charlie Kilgore, Layla Ku, Emma Lee and Jamee Lockard—are set to release their EP, Glow on February 9, a manifestation of the band’s delectable synth-pop hits they often pair on stage with lively choreography. The band’s thoughts on the obsession with girlhood are as diverse as the experience itself. “I think nostalgia is strong but the trendiness or commodification of ‘young girl, girl youth’ is maybe off-putting,” Lee said. “I don’t mean to be sour on it. I think it’s an incredibly moving and also scary, intense thing to be a girl, to grow up in girlhood, to become an adult who is not a man right now. Maybe this interest honors that?”

Even if the overall interest doesn’t quite “honor” girlhood, the collective’s new project has benefited from the idea that “girls just wanna have fun,” allowing them to take themselves a little less seriously and relax while creating, D’Angelo said. “There’s a song of ours that’s not out yet that we refer to as “Mentos”,” she added, pointing to how the super-focus on femininity has made its way into their music. “Even though it’s about a doomed relationship, the song itself and the experience of writing it feel super in touch with this way of being.”

So, what will come after the Year of the Girl? Will we be bolstered into a new era of adolescence, forced to deal with uncomfortable growth spurts as impending political and financial shifts manifest into reality? Part of me thinks it’s time to stop dwelling on the dream of youth and freedom in preparation for the inevitable, but there’s another part of me—perhaps the part that prefers a quick girl dinner over a sit-down meal—that isn’t quite ready. Still, in a world that seems hellbent on forcing us into a deranged adulthood, we’re lucky that artists are giving us something sweet, poppy and girlish to sing about. What’s the harm in being forever young? As D’Angelo of MICHELLE told us, “If it’s making the girls happy, so be it.”

Erica is an entertainment journalist, host and the current Music Editor at PAPER. She’s the former Features Editor (US) of NME and her stories have been featured in Spin, Glamour, Architectural Digest, W Magazine and more. She lives in New York City with her dog Maddox and a collection of star-ornamented boots that would make David Bowie proud.

Is This It?: Making Music in the Year of the Girl

Is This It? examines the current state of rock music through a modern-day lens, highlighting the artists, perspectives and sounds that have kept the genre and its dedication to counter-culture alive.