girl in red: The Story of the Norsk Star

Ben Broyd
4 min readApr 30, 2021
‘If I Could Make It Go Quiet’: Her debut album. Out today.

girl in red is the indie-pop music project of Norwegian singer-songwriter and record producer Marie Ulven. Based in Grunerlokka, a suburb of Oslo, Marie rose to fame through her bedroom pop songs based around queer romance and mental health that featured on her early EPs Chapter 1 (2018) and Chapter 2 (2019). In fact, her sexuality played a large part in the settling of her stage name, initially experimenting with the pseudonyms such as Lydia X, and Lyfsuxxx, she settled on girl in red as a reference to when she came out.

No interest in music until later in life.

Marie grew up showing no real interest in music until her grandfather, who could play the guitar and piano, gifted her a guitar as a Christmas present. Ulven always preferred fingerboarding and skateboarding over music, until a year after receiving the present and losing interest in skating, she picked up the guitar. It changed her world. The art of learning the guitar allowed Marie to develop her musical nous as well. Soon after starting, she discovered the likes of The Smiths, David Bowie, and The Ramones, and swore to herself that all she’d ever want to do for the rest of her life is be a musician. Ulven explains: “Learning an instrument is really hard, I think a lot of people want to…

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Ben Broyd

I write about music, amongst other things. Hope you enjoy.