PRESS RELEASE: GIRLHOOD Turn Heartbreak Into Something Sweet On Fourth AlbumThis Will Make Sense In The End
The critically acclaimed UK indie-pop duo's fourth album blends soul-soaked samples, left-field pop and uncomfortably honest storytelling about the messy appetites of love, desire and self-discovery.
This record marks their fourth album, and the first since their debut to be written in a room together. Built around the voice and writing of singer-songwriter Natalie Holmes, the record marks a major shift in the project’s creative life. After seeing Holmes perform in support of Jesca Hoop, Girlhood founder, producer and songwriter Christian Pinchbeck asked her to collaborate. What began as an instinctive creative meeting became something more transformative: the return of a dynamic that felt immediate, physical and alive. After years of working remotely with friends-of-friends and guest vocalists, Girlhood suddenly felt like a band again.
The album was written during a period in Natalie’s life where dating, appetite and self-understanding had begun to change shape. Reaching her thirties brought a new kind of clarity, but also a stranger kind of uncertainty: the sense that old romantic instincts no longer worked in the same way, that love could be exciting and damaging at once, and that wanting something was not the same as needing it. Her complicated relationship with food became part of that language too, folded into songs about attraction, control, hunger, sweetness, sourness, fullness and self-preservation.
Across This Will Make Sense In The End, food becomes both metaphor and setting: picnics, lemonade, breakfast, fruit, dessert, dilution and hunger all recur like clues left in plain sight. The result is a record about one relationship, but also about the wider emotional machinery around it - the rituals, appetites, performances and small private negotiations that come with trying to love someone without disappearing into them.
Musically, the album began with an experiment: taking old soul vinyl cuts and pushing them until they no longer behaved like samples. Rather than using them as nostalgic decoration, Girlhood warped, chopped and re-contextualized them into new rhythms, textures and emotional landscapes. That process became the engine of the record. Songs move from sample-heavy, sunlit pop into stranger, more fractured shapes; from upbeat, beat-driven moments into sparse R&B, acoustic confessionals and cinematic emotional release.
The album focus track "Straight At The Bar" (about wanting to be loved for who you are, rather than someone's ideal version of you) captures that tension perfectly. The song centers on a relationship that made Natalie feel incredibly alive and incredibly empty at the same time — sickness in the medicine. The relationship devolves into the hottest mess, fueled by intrigue and attraction, the pleasure and the drama; making Natalie feel watered down. Toward the end, the song becomes a pep talk to remember this dizzying feeling and not turn back.
GIRLHOOD
This Will Make Sense In The End
Track Listing
1. It Could Be Worse
2. Lemon Aid
3. Picnic
4. Cracked
6. Silver Lining
7. Island to Island
8. Born Hungry
9. Chapter 32
10. I Wouldn’t Change a Thing
Previous singles “Lemon Aid” (about trying to turn pressure into sweetness and trying to dance until the feeling either lifts or breaks) and "Picnic" (about desire, dating, and the gap between what we think will satisfy us and what actually does) play with the juxtapositions of bright and outwardly playful music and the messier/heavier lyrical topics about desire, emotional recalibration, dating and the complicated things we’re led to believe we need and want in order to feel fulfilled.
Rooted in the small goings-on of Stroud, UK (the Cotswold town where the album was made), This Will Make Sense In The End finds drama in the ordinary. Cafés, take out food joints, parks, shopfronts, weather, conversations and quiet domestic details become part of the record’s emotional geography. It is British not through grand gestures, but through lived-in specifics: a grey afternoon, a familiar street, a half-joke that lands too close to the truth.
The result is Girlhood’s most intimate and fully realized record yet: sample-based pop with soul in its bloodstream, rooted in the everyday and written with the hindsight of someone still working out what it all meant.
Girlhood is Natalie Holmes and Christian Pinchbeck. This Will Make Sense In The End is available now via OK!Good Records.
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