Track by track: girlfriend.'s fiery and cathartic new album  Carousel

The Dublin-Limerick five-piece whose music pulls from emo, slowcore, grunge, punk and garage-rock have released a new album this month called Carousel.

Ambitious, cathartic and increasingly fidgety stylistically,  Carousel is an album borne of the moment – aware of the zeitgeist explorations of shoegaze and slowcore, but pre-existing and prone to heavier eruptions, creating an album that runs the gamut of guitar-lead rock performance with ease, across its short 28 minutes.

Here are the band’s words on each track on the album.

Girlfriend. are Hana Lamari, Lahela Jones, Sophie Dunne and Eilis Mahon.

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1. Nothing’s Real:

Sophie: This song was written a good few years ago and when working on the album we decided to bring it back into the fold. The end of the song features a voice note from my phone of the famous bells of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Limerick. I’ve lived in Limerick for 3 years now and its where we wrote/practiced and recorded a lot of the album. I have a lot of love for the city and gf owe so much to the legends in the arts and music community here so it was only right to throw in that recording. Our engineer and good friend Chris Quigley helped us a lot with shaping the structure and dream like vibe of the song. 

2. Kitchen Sink:

Eilis: Potentially the oldest song on the album, written in 2020 I think!

I have vivid memories of being trapped in my room during the pandemic writing this. The pandemic definitely subconsciously influenced the imagery in the song. Lyrically it’s about feeling alienated, questioning your identity and how these things can affect relationships.

For some reason this was the most frustrating song on the album to record, it took us ages to get a good take but we got there eventually. A highlight for me in the final track is Sophie’s backing vocals and the 12 string guitar overdub at the end that sounds like a sitar.

We’ve also been playing this song live since we released our first album believe it or not. The live vibe really informed how we wanted to record this song – raw, loud & vulnerable, just like a gf show.

3. Horses:

Eilis: I’m kind of obsessed with animal imagery in songs, and equally with songwriters who create their own symbols to build the world of their songs that they reference again and again (Mark Linkous is my #1 for this).

This song was kind of written as a response to Wild Horses by The Rolling Stones. My Mum used to listen to the cover by The Sundays all the time when I aas younger and the lyrics just stuck with me. Wild Horses feels like a very defiant song, whereas our song is kind of a song of surrender. 

The lyrics are about resigning yourself to fate, and feeling powerless to what lies ahead of you. 

I love how doomy it is, and love Robyn’s shredding in the first section. It’s so much fun to play live.

4. Black and Blue:

Sophie: The feedback at the start of this track was great craic to record in the studio. Our engineer Chris let us go as loud and as wild as we wanted and we came out with some cool stuff. The idea of doing a call and response between Sophie and Hana in the bridge section came quite late in the recording process and was really fun to do together.

5. Fucking it all away:

Eilis: This used to be called ‘ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ’. Written in 2023 during a time when I would walk an hour to and from work everyday to a job I hated.

I spent a lot of that walk working on songs or recording vocal ideas on my phone voice memos. I was the only person working in what was basically a shipping container in an industrial estate just outside Limerick, and I would belt out songs and do karaoke and hope that the men in the garage next door couldn’t hear. I have voice recordings on my phone of writing part of the vocal arrangement for this song in that office, which was then built on by Hana and Sophie who added really layered nice harmonies to it.

The lyrics are about the desire to ruin your life due to your insecurities, and anxious attachment.

The intro for the song was written as a band after the main song came together, and I love it so much. 

Chris (who recorded the album) has said to me that this song reminds him of Wish Fulfillment by Sonic Youth. SY are one of my fav bands ever so I find that really cool and flattering. 

6. Trees:

Sophie: This song came together in the studio. We started working on it as a band in rehearsal about two weeks before we recorded and went in with the mindset of if it works, that’s great, if it doesn’t, that’s no big deal. It all worked out well for us! Robyn’s lead guitar line makes this song sound huge. Our engineer and good friend Chris Quigley made the suggestion to slow the song with Hana’s lead vocal on it down for me to add the harmony, which was then sped up and pitched up. I’m a huge fan of Ween and Alex G so the pitched up vocal was definitely influenced by them. 

7. Shrew:

Eilis: When this song was first written it was much slower, and was written as a writing exercise that I didn’t think would go anywhere. 

After a while of being lost in the gf soundcloud, Lahela (our old drummer) had the idea of working on it as a band, and we ended up turning it into a thrashy jam with a cool hardcore-y bridge. 

Hana has some really vocal stuff going on in this recording, Chris did some dense vocal layering towards the end which sounds unreal. 

8. A Deeper Blue: 

Hana: I love slowed and reverbed versions of songs on youtube and also think chopped and screwed music is class, so that was some of the inspo for doing this version of Black&Blue. 

Robyn: we came up with this slower arrangement of B&B for an acoustic show we played with our dear friends Skinner. We changed the chords around a lil for a slightly jazzier feel, and gave it this really murky atmosphere that just drives and drives. It felt far too magic to not record it, and then Chris had the beautiful idea of pitching the whole thing down after recording, giving a very woozy, dreamlike quality to the song. I specifically love the warped vocals at the end of the bridge that sound like sirens. Crazy stuff.

9. Vampires:

Sophie: We came up with the instrumental to this song super quick one practice. It was so fun to write together with the idea of making the guitars sound as ugly as possible while sticking to a traditional “hardcore song” structure and keep it short 

and sweet. Eilis’ bass tone in the recording is so class and massive. 

Hana: I wrote the vocals for this song after I’d watched almost all of The Vampire Diaries and True Blood, so I defo had vampires on the brain when writing, but it is about coping methods we rely on to get us through our mental illness, relationship to that, and how it changes you.

10. Jumper: 

Hana: We originally called this one “Nintendogs Night Walk”. Two weeks before we went into the studio to record the album, we were having a practise at the gaf, and afterwards Sophie started playing the chords, and I started singing some lyrics I had (I often start overheating or feel really cold+exposed or like my clothes are too tight so I really do be taking my jumper or other clothing items off and them putting them back on again), and then I had the idea for the tempo changes, and so it really came together in the studio then as we didn’t have much opportunity to work on it together before then. This one is about being a single independent freak ass bitch dealing with situationships and loneliness. 

I had so much fun recording backing vocals with Eilis on this and Robyn’s epic tapping lead guitar line was another highlight for me, I remember me and Chris cheering her on from his home studio when we were recording it. 

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Catch girlfriend. live at the following gigs:

Tour dates:

• Friday September 18th – The Sound House, Dublin, Ireland — with Skinner, Delivery Service & Soft Drink Millionaire — Tickets
• Friday October 2nd – The Workman’s Club, Dublin, Ireland — as part of Ireland Music Week 2026 — Tickets
• Friday October 23rd – Saturday October 24th – Left of the Dial festival, Rotterdam, Netherlands — Tickets
• Wednesday December 2nd – The Telegraph Building, Belfast, Northern Ireland — supporting Enter Shikari — Tickets
• Thursday December 3rd – The Academy, Dublin, Ireland — supporting Enter Shikari — Tickets
• Friday December 4th – The Academy, Dublin, Ireland — supporting Enter Shikari