GENRE: Rap
LABEL: Artist House
REVIEWED: 18 October, 2025
RATING: 6.4
Princess Nokia’s Girls is a compact, often confrontational record that wears its intentions on its sleeve: witchy, high-fashion, and fiercely feminine. Released October 10, 2025, the 12-track set moves between bruising, Lynch-tinged synth-punk and softer, intimate passages — a push-and-pull between rage and tenderness that’s central to the album’s identity. (Release and track details on Apple Music.)
Sonically, Girls thrives when it leans into contrasts. Lead single “Blue Velvet” opens the record with cinematic menace (Pitchfork notes the Lynchian references), and tracks like “Medusa” and “Period Blood” pair abrasive ‘80s-style synths with moments of vulnerable lyricism, which lets Princess Nokia alternate between the sneer and the confession effectively. Several reviewers praise the production for buoying bold lyrical moments even when the songwriting sometimes wavers.
Lyrically and thematically the album is resolutely feminist and confrontational: it indicts patriarchal violence, centers bodily imagery (menstruation and mythic feminine figures recur), and celebrates queer and femme identities. Critics and fans alike have emphasized the record’s unapologetic embrace of the “ferocious feminine,” with some calling it a powerful statement and others pointing out unevenness across the back half of the LP. (See Pitchfork’s 6.5 review and responses on community boards.)
Where Girls stumbles is in consistency: several outlets and listeners note a stronger first half and a second half that loses momentum, with a few tracks feeling underdeveloped compared to the album’s best moments. Still, when it hits, it hits hard — a blend of theatricality, horny aggression, and sincerity that makes it one of Nokia’s boldest statements in years.
Availability and reception snapshot: Girls is streaming on major platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, SoundCloud), accompanied by singles/music videos for “Blue Velvet” and “Drop Dead Gorgeous,” and has already sparked conversation and tour dates tied to the release. Fan threads praise songs like “Medusa,” “Matcha Cherry,” and “Gossip Girl” as standouts.
Bottom line: Girls isn’t subtle, and it doesn’t try to be. It’s a concise, theatrical manifesto that stretches Princess Nokia’s punk-rap eccentricities into pop and hyper-dramatic realms. If you love artists who mix shock imagery, mythic metaphors, and unapologetic femme power, this album will reward repeat listens — especially the opening sequence. If you prefer tighter, uniformly polished albums, expect some high peaks and a couple of flat stretches.
