In her column, “Discover Biweekly,” Helena Getahun-Hawkins ’25 introduces readers to her favorite emerging artists. Behold, a playlist full of this week’s artist’s best songs.
Girl Ultra lives in a reality in which romance is not found wading through the tepid bowels of Hinge; instead, it lies in shy glances and accidental brushes of skin. Her world is one of mulberry-colored lipstick and languidly waiting for the phone to ring and damp clubs where bangs stick to foreheads. It’s exactly the type of world that I want to live in.
At this point in time, defining the genre of music made by Mariana de Miguel — the Mexico City songstress who goes by Girl Ultra — is a difficult feat.
When I first started listening to her music nearly five years ago, she was releasing wistful R&B. Her voice, sweet and airy, wrapped around dreamy chord progressions, bouncy plucks of bass guitar and steady drum patterns, delivered the most delectable bittersweet ballads.
“At dawn / I lean out the window / feeling the moon’s glow on my face / your memory keeping me awake,” she sings in Spanish, far more poetic than its English translation in “Llama,” a song from her first album, “Adiós.”
In her 2022 EP, “El Sur,” things start to get a bit grittier. With her heavy charcoal eye makeup, tattered pirate-like skirts and the red string braided haphazardly into her hair, Girl Ultra transforms herself into the rockstar that once lay dormant beneath layers of softness in her previous releases.
“Punk,” a single off the EP, is the perfect choice for her rebellious revamp. The song, a collaboration with indie rock band Little Jesus, is a cover of Gwen Stefani’s “Bubble Pop Electric” with different Spanish lyrics, and it is perhaps a tad more melodic. Its frantic electric guitar strumming and fast drumming inject a new type of energy into her sound. This energy reverberates in the high BPMs of the various house tracks that are sprinkled throughout the EP — a nod to her early days as a DJ in Mexico City.
The Girl Ultra of “El Sur” is not as pensive and nostalgic. She’s hedonistic and free.
“I wasn’t born to fall in love,” she insists in “Amores de droga.”
“You and me / what’s the worst thing that could happen? / We get high, touch the sky,” she teases in the song “BOMBAY.”
This summer, she graced us with “blush,” a coquettish 7-track EP that feels like an open invitation to a house party. Propelled by its jungle beat, the second track of the EP is the most perfect little club track — the kind of club that is dark, underground and full of Girl Ultra’s fashionable friends. It’s the type of song that reminds us that being a girl can be fun and low-stakes sometimes. “bruce willisss,” another gem, creatively combines an indie rock guitar loop with the “untz untz” and booming bass of house music.
What is most impressive to me is that as Girl Ultra’s sound has evolved, spanning across genres and themes, her music has stayed consistently addictive, proving just how versatile she is as an artist.
In some ways, Girl Ultra has received her flowers. She’s scored interviews in papers like the Los Angeles Times. She’s frequently included on Spotify playlists. She even secured her own Tiny Desk Concert last year. And yet she stays relatively distant from the mainstream, in the comfortable cradle of her fanbase, with most of her listeners in Mexico City, according to Spotify.
I’ve been lucky enough to see Girl Ultra perform twice now, having made the pilgrimage to Cornerstone in Berkeley with a couple hundred other 20-somethings dressed in grungy black miniskirts and fishnets. Put simply, she is magical. As she swishes her hips, pressing the mic to her mouth, you can’t help but fall in love with everything about her: her silky voice, her honest lyrics and the romantic version of reality she offers her listeners.
Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.