Girli

Cricklewood, open mics and a name taken back

girli is Milly Toomey, born on 6 December 1997 and raised in north-west London by acting parents. She wrote her first song at eight and was bullied through secondary school at Hampstead School in Cricklewood, where she stayed busy enough with everything else to be elected Deputy Young MP for Camden in 2012. That last detail is not trivia. The through-line from a fourteen-year-old arguing policy at a council table to a songwriter who now calls what she makes opinionated pop is short and straight.

A Tegan and Sara concert at fourteen convinced her to try music seriously; she has said she came out at fifteen. She played open mics under her own name and sang and played guitar in an indie band called Ask Martin before settling on girli — a nod to Blondie, and a deliberate reclamation of a word she has described as carrying stigma. Her account of the choice is blunt: weaponising everything that was being used against her.

She studied at East London Arts & Music between 2014 and 2016 and released her first single, So You Think You Can Fuck with Me Do Ya?, in 2015, aged seventeen. Early sets involved throwing tampons into the crowd. In 2016 she partnered with Girls Against, the campaign against sexual harassment at gigs. The Guardian has described her sound as moving between PC Music, bubblegum pop, pop-punk and rap, each mode sitting somewhere between catchy and deliberately uncomfortable.

Signed, sanded down, dropped

The major-label years ran through PMR Records under the Virgin EMI umbrella. She toured the UK supporting Oscar in 2016, put out two EPs in 2017 — Feel OK and Hot Mess — and supported Declan McKenna the same year. The debut album Odd One Out arrived in April 2019. She was dropped by the label that year, and released Up & Down that July, a song about her mental health; she has been open about an OCD diagnosis and about taking antidepressants.

Her own diagnosis of what went wrong is not a grudge so much as a design note. She started out with a strong political drive, she has said, and watched it get diluted as she was pushed towards being more commercially viable. Everything since has been an argument against that dilution.

The rebuild was slow. A Sofa Tour planned for 2020 died with the pandemic. The Ex Talk EP came out on the independent AllPoints in February 2021, Why Am I Like This? followed in May 2023, and the second album, Matriarchy, arrived on 17 May 2024 — five years after the debut, and the record that fixed her reputation for writing about queer love and feminist anger without sanding the edges off either.

it's just my opinion

The third album takes its title from a phrase she kept meeting in her own replies: the thing people say defensively just before something cutting, or to write off somebody else's view entirely. It came out on 8 May 2026 via Believe — twelve tracks, thirty-five and a half minutes, every lyric written by Toomey, with production shared between Jack Bowden, Georgia Flipo and Aidan Hogg among others.

It was cut between Los Angeles and London and leans harder on live playing than anything she had made before, with Haim, Wet Leg and Wolf Alice cited as the reference points. It is the first girli album tracked to live drums. The writing came out fast and crowded — she has described a desperation to say a great deal at once — with two of the most aggressive songs, Slap on the Wrist and Squirm, added late once she worked out what the record was still missing. The reason she gives for the politics being back in the foreground is unadorned: the world feels like it is going badly wrong.

The singles ran ahead of it in sequence: Better Undressed on 12 November 2025, Slap on the Wrist on 20 January 2026, Romantic Sadness on 20 February and Squirm on 31 March. Romantic Sadness came out of watching her younger sister go through a break-up — the point at which, as she put it, the sadness can no longer be romanticised and is just sad.

Commercially it did what an independent record by an artist with a devoted rather than enormous audience does. It entered the UK albums chart at 80, the UK independent chart at 6 and the Scottish chart at 16. Clash gave it seven out of ten, Yasmin Cowan calling it a raw, intimate expression of girli's innermost thoughts that balances vulnerability with empowerment. When The Horn Blows singled out Blue Sky, on social anxiety and the urge to disappear, Slap on the Wrist, on women's safety, and the closing romance of The Answer.

Where she is now

Release week was worked from the shop floor: in-store shows at Rough Trade Liverpool on 12 May, Rough Trade East in London on 13 May and Rough Trade Nottingham on 14 May. The North American tour followed, twelve dates from 11 June to 1 July — Baby's All Right in Brooklyn, then Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Toronto, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Indianapolis, Denver, Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland, with tickets having gone on sale on 20 February. The Brooklyn opener was pointed: it is the same room where she played her first American show in 2023, that time with nothing behind her but a backing vocalist and a track.

Summer brought festival work, including a set at Brechin Castle Showfield in Angus on 16 August. The autumn run is the long one. A European leg opens at Betty in Hamburg on 6 October and takes in Berlin, Istanbul, Warsaw, Krakow, Vienna, Prague, Cologne, Utrecht and Paris, closing at Badaboum on 20 October. The UK leg starts at Strange Brew in Bristol on 28 October and runs through The Revenge in Brighton, Village Underground in London, Band on the Wall in Manchester and The Wardrobe in Leeds before finishing at G2 in Glasgow on 5 November.

The venues are worth reading properly. These are three- and five-hundred-capacity rooms, booked by an artist eleven years into a career with more than a hundred million streams behind her. That gap between streaming reach and room size is the shape of the modern independent career, and she is touring it rather than complaining about it.

The band arrives

The biggest change on this cycle is not the songwriting, it is the personnel. The 2026 tour is the first where girli has had an actual guitarist on stage alongside a drummer — Casey on guitar, Chloe on drums at the Brooklyn opener. For a performer whose catalogue was built on samples, video-game noise and news clips, putting two people behind her who can push the tempo around changes what the older material does in a room.

Her own description of the shows is that they are quite therapeutic, a sort of group therapy — which matches what the audiences do with them. The reviewer at the Los Angeles date found a crowd that had come to sing, shout and join in rather than watch.