Chatting with Girl Group about their new EP ‘Little Sticky Pictures’ and Being a Woman in Music

Less than a year after the release of their debut project, Think They’re Looking, Let’s Perform, British-Norwegian band Girl Group is ready for their next journey. This time, with their brand new 6-track EP Little Sticky Pictures, which dropped on March 20.

Lily, Katya, Thea, Mia and Maria continue to sing and dance about the pain of being a young woman in a world designed for and by men. Preserving their genre-bending sound, the new project is a dynamic and stimulating collection of hyper-pop tracks and rock influences, perfectly encapsulating the spectrum of female emotions.

Quickly becoming one of our new favorite bands, Staged Haze was lucky enough to ask Girl Group about their creative process, the girlhood experience, and the highs and lows of entering the music industry.

STAGED HAZE: You’ve mentioned that moving to Liverpool gave you some more freedom to make the project however you wanted–but are there some strictly Norwegian things that you think have influenced your brand and artistry?

GIRL GROUP: We wrote a song called “Flink Pike,” which is a Norwegian term about the pressure on young girls to be good at everything they do.

STAGED HAZE: So many artists start off in their teens and don’t get to explore a true coming-of-age before being in the spotlight. How do you think attending LIPA (Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts) enhanced and/or affected your approach to art?

GIRL GROUP: I think we definitely learned things about the process of songwriting (which was good, because we all did the songwriting course), and I think being around so many confident, ambitious people had a knock-on effect on us.

STAGED HAZE: There’s five of you and probably at least one of you is going through something that you can write about at all times. But are there any other people, places, or anything else that you look to for inspiration at times?

GIRL GROUP: Weirdly, fairly few of our songs come from an individual girl’s experiences, they’re usually the shared experiences of the group. Being a feminist project, we largely find inspiration from the things that upset and frustrate us about the way that society is set up. They almost always relate to the experience of being a woman in some way.

STAGED HAZE: What was your favorite part of making your new EP Little Sticky Pictures? How was the experience different from making your debut EP?

GIRL GROUP: I think our favourite part is usually always the beginning, when you’ve got all this blank space before you, full of possibility. The experience was different insofar as we’d done it before so we had a better idea of what we were doing, and what Girl Group was and could be.

But also, by Little Sticky Pictures, we’d gone from making tunes in our bedrooms to being able to record stuff in mad studios with loads of equipment pretty quickly, so simply adjusting to our new position as ‘professionals’ probably affected the process. We were—and still are—trying to get our heads around how the hell we managed it.

STAGED HAZE: How do you come to a consensus in the songwriting process with five group members? Do some of you sometimes just have to kind of “give in”?

GIRL GROUP: Our philosophy is to never really compromise, in that it’s better that one person really loves something than two people finding it okay. Our songwriting process certainly involves a lot of discussion and trying to get on the same page as one another, as we do feel it’s important for everyone to feel they can take part and relate to the song. We tend to decide on a subject [or] feeling first, then everyone chips in with bits they’ve written and the song takes shape.

STAGED HAZE: Now that you’ve been on the road, what have been your favorite and least favorite parts about touring? Where in the world do you hope to perform one day?

GIRL GROUP: [Our] favourite bits are being in the van with each other and just having a silly time. It really feels like a permanent residential school trip. And playing of course.

By the same token, our least favourite parts are probably the overwhelm that can come with living on top of each other. And surviving on cheese sandwiches.

STAGED HAZE: Is there an aspect of being part of the music industry that you weren’t expecting but that has been surprisingly fun for you?

GIRL GROUP: Social media is probably every artist’s worst part of their job, passion, life, and it’s definitely not our favourite, but what has been surprisingly nice about finding who we are online is the creativity we’ve found through doing it. We’ve had to think a lot about how we’d like to represent ourselves and make videos we’re proud of, which has involved thinking a little outside the box at times. So it’s a cool feeling like we’ve created something visually unique for ourselves.

STAGED HAZE: With success come record labels, expectations and men in suits. Since authenticity and earnestness have been two very strong qualities about your group, has it been hard to protect yourselves from that or has it worked out well so far?

GIRL GROUP: It has at times. Despite who we are and what we stand for, we still feel pressure to perform well and to prove to people that we deserve the opportunities we’ve been given. But after just a year of being “in the industry,”we’ve learnt that our creative voices are always the most important, and we feel protected by our team in that.

STAGED HAZE: Who are some female artists that you think deserve better?

GIRL GROUP: Madonna deserves better. She’s done so much for women in music in terms of paving the way. She embraced her sexuality in a way I’m not sure another mainstream female pop artist had before then, and she’s still pushing boundaries, presenting herself as a sexual being despite being older. But she’s always received vilification for this and it’s a shame.

STAGED HAZE: You’ve talked a lot about being told that liking “girly” wasn’t cool or it was childish, and how hurtful that is. How would you want younger girls to understand the concept of girlhood instead?

GIRL GROUP: That the only reason “girliness” is seen as lame is because it’s not masculine. After having to spend so many years being labeled as “uncool” or “weak,”we need to embrace femininity into every aspect of modern society in order to create a better, kinder, cuntier world.

Sticky Little Pictures is out now. Girl Group is performing at The Great Escape festival in Brighton on May 14.