As autumn strips the trees bare, girl in red releases “Blue”, an EP about a relationship that stopped, started again, and wrote itself in real time.
It’s mid-October when Marie Ulven Ringheim, better known by her artist moniker girl in red, pops up on my laptop screen. Outside my window, the car park is awash with rain and the one tree in sight is slowly giving up its leaves. Beyond it, people hurry past with their hands stuffed into their jackets, dodging puddles with mixed success.
Her view is better, no doubt. She picks up her laptop and spins it round to show me. Behind her, large sash windows look down onto a park; a front-row seat for the seasons changing. She tells me it’s her first proper day in a new apartment, and that she spent the night before not quite sure where she was. It’s strange, she adds, leaving somewhere you’ve lived for five years, and she’s a little emotional about it. Still I get the sense that it’s a comfort to her that even the park outside is mid-move, boxing up its summer and letting the wind carry it off.
It’s also a particularly fitting backdrop for her new EP, “Blue”, out on 23 October. It’s her first multi-track release since her 2024 album I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY!, a synthy, brasher and more danceable record, epitomised by the Sabrina Carpenter-featuring vibrant anthem, “You Need Me Now?”. It felt a world away from the gloomy, introspective songs forged at the beginning of her career such as the iconic we fell in love in october, the queer anthem that floods TikTok FYPs the moment the autumn leaves start to crunch beneath our feet.
“Blue”, however, feels like a return to girl in red’s heyday of sad-girl anthems and soft, intimate bedroom pop. Lyrically, it chronicles a relationship that has stopped and started again, carried along by soft guitars, her signature floaty vocals and visceral, uncensored lyrics.
As the mid-section arrives in the title track, for example, there is a metaphor of time passing being like ageing denim. What she knew before has worn and changed like the fibre of the material, and now, it feels like looking too hard at each strand of denim may reveal how much the person in front of her has changed. It’s a devastating realisation that can feel difficult to put your finger on, yet somehow she manages to encapsulate it successfully through such evocative lyricism.
When I push further on the meaning of blue, not just the album but the word itself, she is similarly poetic. “It’s a type of foundational loneliness…like you’re walking in the park, even on the sunniest day and you see people laughing, and it feels like you’re never going to laugh again”. Being blue, it seems, for girl in red, is like living in a parallel universe. A place where you’re surveilling the way people’s eyes move, their lips quiver and their frown lines form, just for some proof that someone might feel a shred of what you do.
What strikes me also, as she talks me through it, is how little of “Blue” was ever finished in one sitting. The idea first arrived in June 2025 and drifted around her head all summer, and by August she had started recording. But the story it was telling hadn’t reached its ending yet, so neither could the song itself.
It sat on the sidelines – a first verse and not much else, while she and her ex stopped speaking for what she describes as a very long time. It was only when they saw each other again that the rest came. The second verse first and then the bridge, as though the song had been waiting patiently in the pages of her journal for her real life to catch up and the creases from the dog-ears could flatten out again. They’re back together now, and she tells me she was so overwhelmed writing it as it happened that it became almost a relief. “That song is the realest shit I’ve made in a very long time.”
I ask her whether such vulnerability scares her. After all, the entire EP is about a very real turn of events between her and her girlfriend. But if anything, such intimacy is “natural to her” when recording. Ironically, it’s the real-life confrontations that scare her more – the words she pens for millions to hear, offering a layer of detachment for her.
This surprises me, especially because the music video that accompanies the title track features her and her actual girlfriend in real-life. Though she tells me, laughing, that the casting came after teasing threats of a different “baddie” being in the video, something her girlfriend vehemently refused. “Oh, fuck no, not that baddie.”
The video was directed by her long-time collaborator Isak Jenssen, who originally pictured the story as close-ups of the couple, with some animation added later. For many, the idea of performing your real love with your significant other on camera would feel weird, and it was no different for girl in red.
She says it was harder than playing opposite professional actors in her recent film. “I realised how sincere you are really with your partner.” They giggled through it and then went oddly polite with each other, with the ten crew watching from behind the camera, capturing it all. “It’s better to be girlfriends in real life rather than acting.” Still, she tells me, “I’m glad that she did it. And I think there’s something quite poetic about it”, not least because her girlfriend wants no part of the spotlight at all.
In terms of the rest of the EP, she likes to imagine that if it were to resemble anything, it would be Bob Dylan with his hands tucked firmly in his pockets, just like he is pictured on the cover of his breakthrough record: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
In her own version, however, he would be trudging through snow, the biting cold of New York forcing him to cling onto himself. She tells me she imagines it like this because of her own time in the city. A time plagued by hopeless sadness, iced pertinently with the sharp unforgiving cold of the city that never sleeps.
This is where, she tells me, “missing person” was first conceptualised. The second track of the EP and perhaps the saddest, the song turns the idea of a missing person on its head, with the narrator left to reckon with her own part in losing someone she loves. You palpably feel the particular kind of hurt that she aims to encapsulate. The very feeling that comes with recognising your own mistakes after the fact, even when the person who might have forgiven you is no longer there to hear your apologies.
Elsewhere on the EP, “worst case” looks at the fear of letting somebody in, while “clean slate” considers how difficult it can be to leave old habits behind and start again. There is a certain irony to it all, given that Marie and her girlfriend have since found their way back to each other. Of course, these songs were written before she knew that would happen, when the future of their relationship was still uncertain and there was no guarantee that things would work out. The result is a record that catches a relationship at its most vulnerable, with all the messiness and second-guessing that comes with it.
For all the sadness running through “Blue”, there is something tender and romantic about the way girl in red writes about being in love. Even at its lowest points, the relationship is never reduced to something so black and white. Something dire or irredeemable. Yes, there is the fear of losing someone, the guilt of knowing you have hurt them, and the rather human hope that things might still be put right, but it’s the very presence of all of these conflicting emotions that makes the EP so endearing in the first place.
As the interview comes to a close, outside her window, autumn continues to settle in. girl in red has left one home behind and is finding her way around the walls of another, while the trees beyond the frosted glass carry on shedding their leaves. There is plenty of change happening at once. Some of it is welcome and some of it is harder to make sense of. For now, though, it seems that she is content enough to let things unfold and be what they may.
Listen to the EP…
Words – Isabella Guarnieri
