girl in red - I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY!

“It’s not like I want to die / At least not now / I love being alive,” sings girl in red’s Marie Ulven on ‘I’m Back’, the opening track on this second full-length. As expected, there’s plenty of both wide-eyed excitability and depressive realism. Across the record, the Norwegian indie-pop auteur careens between suffocating neuroses and radical self-acceptance, settling mostly in the latter. This LP refines the smorgasbord of ideas present on ‘if i could make it go quiet’, making coherent all its noise while retaining deft Scandipop craftsmanship and wit. Elsewhere, it’s largely a classic continuation of what’s come before: she’s still trying to tame her fidgety mind while cleverly sandwiching oxymoronic sounds. Frenetic indie rollicker ‘DOING IT AGAIN BABY’ devolves into a country throw-down; alternative anthem ‘You Need Me Now?’ brings on board pop singer Sabrina Carpenter; and the soft haze in ‘Phantom Pain’ ends with tearing vocals. The most suggestive of best-yet-to-come, however, is the art-pop closer ‘★★★★★’, where a brazenly self-aware Marie examines her knack for commodifying strife. “You’ve gotta be delusional to be in the biz […] I do amazingly bad at making magnificent trash,” she decrees over a fizzing, choppy percussive cacophony. In doubling down on her niche - that is, artsy Scandi-indie-pop - ’I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY!’ is girl in red at her most realised.