Princess Nokia Has No Time for Subtlety on Girls

There’s a look on Sissy Spacek’s face near the end of Carrie’s prom scene that never fades from memory: blank, calm, blood-soaked. She surveys the gym she’s just immolated, her gaze wide and unflinching, as her classmates scatter like insects. Princess Nokia channels that same energy on the first full track of Girls, launching into a deadpan monologue against abusers and patriarchy while cloaked in the language of Santería and Greek myth. You can almost see her wearing Spacek’s stare in the booth. The moment sets the tone for a record that swaps nuance for catharsis, daring you to ask: who has time for subtlety anymore?

Between 2023’s i love you but this is goodbye and Girls, the New York rapper fell into the world of David Lynch — particularly Twin Peaks and its doomed ingenue, Laura Palmer. She nods to both on opener “Blue Velvet,” where she murmurs, “I’ve been through too much, babe, I feel like Laura Palmer / I’ve been a statistic, and every one ignored me,” with a steadiness that chills. The Lynchian influence isn’t just surface reference; it runs through Girls’ core — a fascination with beauty and rot, the divine and the grotesque, existing in the same frame. Written over a year, the album lashes out at misogyny before turning inward to celebrate self-love and feminine power, wielding every heavy-handed symbol it can find to make the point stick.

Nokia and producers Joey Wunsch and Al von Staats swing between extremes: the blaring ’80s synths of “Medusa” crash into the soft aquatic ambience of “Period Blood” as if to simulate emotional whiplash. Across 12 tracks, the album wavers between intensity and indulgence. She’s most convincing when she keeps her voice low and deliberate, drawing from New York’s boom-bap roots. “I’m drinking blood in the mountain, I got the fountain of youth,” she whispers over ghostly shrieks on “Blue Velvet,” letting menace do the heavy lifting. But elsewhere, the production loses focus. “Drop Dead Gorgeous” lands like a half-speed Charli XCX track, and “Pink Bronco,” featuring Lindsey Stirling, feels too much like a Lana Del Rey outtake — lush but hollow, its Americana aesthetic more costume than critique.

Still, Girls offers moments where the ambition catches up to the concept. “Matcha Cherry” is lush and hypnotic, its string arrangements blossoming under a refrain that glows with queer devotion: “I’m in love with her, see myself in her, I think I know that, girl.” “Gossip Girl” transforms into a full-blown club sledgehammer, its Tenebrae-style synths pushing Nokia’s satire into something close to triumph. And on “Phoebe Philo,” she’s at her sharpest, cutting through industry and influencer archetypes with surgical disdain: “You’re male-centered and you make bad decisions / Bird bitches all bread, no chicken.”

Girls works best when it’s less a sermon and more a séance — when Nokia’s anger, humor, and mysticism collapse into a single, unbroken mood. “Girlhood is a spectrum, pretty is destruction / I just fell from grace, and I made it into something,” she declares on “Blue Velvet.” It’s both manifesto and mission statement. The album’s grip sometimes loosens, but her intent never does: Girls is a record that stares straight through the smoke, unblinking.