GIRLS — Princess Nokia

Artist House · 10 October 2025 · 12 tracks · 33 minutes

9 / 10

There’s a version of Princess Nokia’s career that never escapes the shadow of 1992 Deluxe. The one where Destiny Frasqueri keeps retreading that album’s feral, self-mythologising energy until it curdles into self-parody. She’s flirted with that trap before — Everything Sucks and Everything Is Beautiful had moments of genuine brilliance but too much sprawl to land with real force. GIRLS is the album that finally, decisively, closes the door on that anxiety. This is not a sequel to 1992. It’s something harder to pull off: a second statement.

Thirty-three minutes, twelve tracks, zero filler. The concept is deceptively simple — femininity as both armour and celebration, girlhood as a discipline — but Nokia executes it with the precision of someone who’s been carrying this record in her chest for years. Think of it as her college thesis, except the thesis is that a life built around women, for women, is not a consolation prize. It’s the whole point.

The album opens with “Girl FM #1”, a short transmission that functions like tuning into a pirate radio station broadcasting exclusively for the girls who already know. It’s a smart structural choice: it frames everything that follows as communal rather than confessional, a broadcast rather than a diary. By the time “Blue Velvet” kicks in properly, Nokia has already set the terms. This is not an album asking for your approval.

“Medusa” is where GIRLS first shows its teeth. Built on a beat that crunches like gravel underfoot, Nokia spits with the kind of coiled aggression that made FLOOD Magazine reach for the word “punky” — and they weren’t wrong, though “punk” undersells how technically accomplished the bars are. She’s always been a rapper who earns her ferocity rather than performing it, and here that distinction matters enormously. The mythological framing isn’t subtle but it doesn’t need to be: if men are going to turn women to stone with their gaze, you may as well own the power they’ve attributed to you.

Then there’s “Period Blood”, which is either going to be the track that converts the sceptics or the one that confirms their worst fears, depending entirely on how seriously they take themselves. We’d argue it’s one of the most audacious moments on any rap album this year — blunt, funny, and completely without embarrassment. Nokia has always had a gift for making taboo feel mundane in the best possible way, and here she weaponises that gift against anyone who’s ever flinched.

“Girl FM #2” arrives two-thirds of the way through like a half-time address, and it lands with the quiet authority of someone who knows exactly how the second half is going to go.

The album’s middle stretch — “Matcha Cherry” through “Beach Babe” — is where GIRLS risks losing momentum, but Nokia navigates it with enough melodic variety to keep things moving. “Gossip Girl” in particular is a genuine earworm, Nokia finding a pocket between rap and sung melody that recalls the nimbleness of her earliest mixtape work without feeling nostalgic. It’s the kind of track that Charli XCX would probably bless with a feature request if their orbits aligned — both artists share that instinct for turning feminine coded language into something with actual structural weight. (You can hear what we mean about that instinct in our BRAT review.)

“Pink Bronco” featuring Lindsey Stirling is the album’s wildest swing and, remarkably, it connects. Stirling’s violin work sits underneath Nokia’s flow like something escaped from a fever dream, and the track has no business working as well as it does. Credit the producers — Nokia herself alongside Joey Wunsch and Al Von Staats — for building a framework sturdy enough to absorb that kind of left-field energy without collapsing.

The album closes with “ArtStar”, and it’s the right call. Where “Girl FM #1” was a broadcast, “ArtStar” is a declaration: Nokia situating herself within a lineage of women who made something out of nothing, who built their own terms because no one was handing them better ones. It doesn’t grandstand. It doesn’t need to.

If there’s a criticism to be lodged — and at a nine we feel obliged to look for one — it’s that the album’s brevity occasionally works against it. A few of the shorter tracks feel like they’re building to a moment that arrives a beat too early. “Beach Babe” in particular has an outro that deserves another thirty seconds of runtime. But this is a minor grievance against a record that has otherwise solved the problem of concision beautifully. In a year full of artists who confused length with substance — and we’ve had a few of those pass through these pages — thirty-three minutes of genuine intention feels like a radical act.

RAYE spent years proving that an independent woman who refuses to compromise her vision is commercially viable; Nokia is proving something adjacent but distinct: that an artist who refuses to centre anyone but her audience of girls can make genuinely great art on those terms alone. Both achievements matter. This one, right now, feels particularly necessary.

GIRLS is the album Nokia’s most devoted fans always suspected she had in her and the one that should finally make everyone else pay attention.