Girl Scout - Headache EP

Indie rock

235 Music

2024

Girl Scout’s third EP Headache is an indie rock barnburner. It sounds like a band that’s just about to break through.

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I Just Needed You To Know is a banger, we knew this. We’ll get to it in a minute, but start with “Desert Island Movies”, the first song on the new Girl Scout EP, Headache:

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It’s a perfect portrait of a very specific moment in life: your friends are pairing off, getting married and acting like grown ups: “They all know things about wine now/but the bottle always tastes like ass/Thirty five fuckin’ dollars/to make it feel like they are upper class”. It’s like the characters from Banal Nightmare. It also has a perfect Bethany Cosentino covering Pavement sound to it.

The whole EP is built around themes of anxiety, depression and relationships gone bad. Here’s “Headache”, which addresses keeping up appearances while dealing with a tragic loss:

You cry yourself to sleep at night

I know, I know that you are sad I know you miss your dad

And you’re disturbed by all the faces on the street

Their smiles are fake

They give you the worst kind of headache

Girl Scout is from Stockholm, but it’s easy to assume they’re from somewhere on the west coast of the US. They’ve had a hell of a few months, opening a dozen or so dates of Alvvays’ European tour, as well as a bunch of their own headline dates around Europe both before and after that tour. The hard work is paying off, with the band getting solid coverage from publications like Dork and Paste.

For Paste, Girl Scout shared a playlist of influences, which is a good listen. I was surprised at the absence of a psychedelic rock influence, since there are elements of modern psych-rock throughout this record. Just watch the last 90 seconds of this live performance of “I Just Wanted You To Know”:

The EP ends with “I’m So Sorry”, a shoegaze-y song about a breakup, (or maybe friendzoning someone?), that unravels into a noisy, intense cacophony.

The band formed while studying jazz at university, and the technical ability is impressive. On top of the instrumental skill, singer Emma Jansson’s vocal has impressive of accuracy and range, but when she boils over, it’s mesmerising. The most memorable moments of “I’m So Sorry” are when she lets loose — either with the pained-sounding vocal runs that take the place of a chorus in the song, or as things slowly unravel at the end, repeating the song’s title while someone lets loose with visceral screams in the background.

Everything about Headache sounds like a band that’s on the verge of breaking through. I hope they find a way to play Toronto while they’re still in their small-venue days.