Girls 96 present ‘Drama’, the first feature-length film from a project increasingly focused on the mundane: relationships that get complicated, cities that seem bigger than we are, and the strange feeling of always being on the way.
‘Drama’ is a word that can mean almost anything. A relationship, an expectation, a minor obsession, a story that someone decided to tell in a different way. It can also be what we do when nothing particularly dramatic is happening.
In ‘Drama’, Girls 96 find interest precisely in this disproportion—in the way small things take on importance, how people become characters, and how an experience changes as it passes from one person to another.
After 1996, Ricardo Gonçalves and Paloma Moniz expanded the project’s universe between Lisbon and London, two cities that run through the album without functioning exactly as settings. There is a simultaneous sense of closeness and distance, of wanting to be everywhere while still feeling like an outsider. Constructed from afar through phone calls, messages, memories, rumors, and phrases picked up along the way, ‘Drama’ transforms this material into characters, situations, and short stories that feel familiar without entirely belonging to anyone.
Girls 96’s music is marked by melodic, confessional narratives wrapped in a range of aesthetic and sonic references—from the most recognizable to the most niche corners of alternative electronic pop music: terms like synth-pop, electroclash, dance-punk, Italo disco, indie pop, and other variants and combinations all sound right; there’s club culture, the internet, humor, and melancholy coexisting without much concern for choosing a side. The productions are dense, but the vocals are more intimate and vulnerable. The result is an album that oscillates between wanting to be seen and preferring to observe, maintaining Girls 96’s physical energy while making room for something more intimate.
