All-girl (Ray) glamour blend new wave with disco-pop as a dazzling homage to the queer dance-pop culture of 1970s and ’80s New York.
We continue our All Women in Rock fiesta with Girl Ray‘s third album released today.>>
Dust off your disco balls and check your rollerskates for spiders – it’s time we reunite ourselves with our disco duos of our past selves. Girl Ray shed their indie-rock dwellings of charming debut Earl Grey and the R&B edibles of Girl to bring an all-encompassing feel-good banquet. Pilfered from the funky disco-pops of the yesteryears, Girl Ray take us to Prestige: a fantasy clubland playing out a recanted scene of love. Falling in it, being afraid of getting hurt by it and the in-between push-pull tensions of it all.
It’s your typical funky disco pop, but it’s invigorated by an injection boost of Hi-NRG eighties by fast tempo in blistering stand-out Everybody’s Saying That, staccato hi-hat rhythms in synth-skyline Up, reverberated intense vocals in Tell Me and pulsating octave basslines in Wanna Dance and themic Space Song. Notably, it was influential on the disco scene. So, it shouldn’t come as no surprise that this trove is littered with it.
“Prestige.. that sounds like one of the naff clubs I used to go in the 80s.” >>>
Of course, the three Londoners didn’t start out in the custodian landscape of a 1970’s NY ballroom. No, they first started out as many other bands before branching out: indie. Girl Ray’s debut of Earl Grey became a listening post of general indie-rock etiquette. With Don’t Go Back In Ten appearing on many feel-good dinner party playlists. Girl managed to change the game with a mix-up of R&B and wavy synth exasperations before we see Prestige before us today – a healthy load of everything together, like a perfect pant-by-numbers biography of Moshi Moshi goodness.
Despite the bands’ meteoric rise of feel-good bops both in indie noughties and 70’s New York sectors, the band can’t deny they’ve had problems with them being an all-girl trio in an ever-dominating world of manly grotch spreading.
I think there are some obvious times where it would be easier to be a guy, or to be straight guys”, Poppy begins, “But saying that, at the end of the day, we just make music and put music out, so it’s hard to say whether the reception would be different if we’d been guys… But we’re lucky to live in a society that’s pretty liberal. As a queer woman, I get by ok, living in London. But obviously there’s work to be done elsewhere. But we’re lucky it’s not really something we have to think about. I mean, the only time I’m thinking about it really is when writing – like I’m keen to use female pronouns in romantic songs, just because there wasn’t so much of that when I was growing up, so it’s cool to try that.”
Despite the ever-circling ominous clouds of a female band (God, the horror), Girl Ray are an escapade of hearty and healthy funky-disco pop canticles that anyone can take a bite into. There’s no too big a mouthful either, Prestige doesn’t hold any prejudice. After all, Prestige is the sound of Girl Ray reclaiming disco music as the celebration of sexuality and outsider culture it started out as. They are the next artist in the roster to follow the nostalgia line of 70’s feel-good temperatures and it works so well in a pop world so overstuffed with re-hashings of classics, Latino beats and overproduced samples.
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