girl in red

girl in red is the project of Norwegian singer-songwriter Marie Ulven, born in 1999, who emerged from Norway's bedroom pop scene by self-recording and self-producing songs uploaded to SoundCloud in the mid-2010s. Her raw, lo-fi home production and unfiltered, diary-like lyrics about queer love, mental health and everyday emotional turmoil resonated widely with a young online audience, and songs like «i wanna be your girlfriend» and «we fell in love in october» became touchstones for a generation discovering its own identity through her music.

Her early EPs, chapter 1 and chapter 2, established a signature sound built on jangly, DIY guitar pop, drum-machine rhythms and close-mic'd, conversational vocals, drawing comparisons to alternative and indie-pop forebears while carving out something distinctly her own. Her name has also become informal shorthand within queer internet culture for describing a certain kind of sapphic aesthetic, a testament to how closely her music and persona became tied to LGBTQ+ representation in pop.

Her debut full-length album, if I could make it go quiet (2021), expanded her sound with fuller production and more textured songwriting while keeping the emotional directness that defined her earlier work. She has continued to release music exploring heartbreak, anxiety and self-acceptance, remaining one of the most recognisable voices to emerge from the 2010s bedroom pop movement.