This article is taken from the December-January 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Princess Nokia sounds angry from the first track on her album Girls, released this October. “Blue Velvet” is a sinister, savage take on male violence and a feminine urge for vengeance that comes on like Nicki Minaj delivering Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. “Men are violent liars, Adam’s apples prove they’re thieves,” she raps. On the cover, she sits on the floor with red-stained underwear on show to the camera.
Unsurprisingly, when I see her play Koko in Camden in November, there aren’t many men in the audience, and the ones who are there are nearly all either accompanying a girlfriend or chaperoning a teenage daughter.
There’s also my 23-year-old son, who I’ve dragged along with me partly so I don’t feel completely alone in what I expect to be a young crowd, and partly because I’m curious about how this stuff is going to land on male ears.
But for all the confrontation of the record, the show — to start with — is a gentle experience. Nokia, who’s from Harlem and is of Puerto Rican descent, comes on stage dressed in a sky-blue empire-line gown.
She looks like she’s escaped from the set of Bridgerton as she opens the set with two of the sweetest on the album, “Matcha Cherry” and “Pink Bronco”.
“Matcha Cherry” is an ode to girls in all their kinds (“The girls who get it, the girls who don’t get it,” as Nokia chats on the outro. “The girls who rot in bed all day, the girls who get up and go to Pilates and yoga.”) “Pink Bronco” celebrates “soft girl life” and sounds like it’s escaped from a Lana Del Rey album — fair turnabout considering how much Del Rey has taken from hip-hop.
There’s a sting to it, though. “Pink Bronco” is a fantasy of high-gloss separatism, defended with force if necessary: “Loaded my shotgun to sit by the door.” She’s “tired of surviving, I just wanna live/ White picket fence with no man and no kid.”
That fence is an image straight out of David Lynch, whose influence is stamped all over the album (hence the track “Blue Velvet”, which also nods to Twin Peaks).
Plenty of other artists have taken notes from Lynch before, including Del Rey (though she denied having seem his films); I’ve written in this column before about the close relationship between Lynch and pop music. Often, his aesthetic is turned into a catch-all for woozy Americana. What Nokia does with him is weirder and more interesting than that.
On Girls, she’s keyed into the darkness of his work, not as a kind of generalised malignity, but as a very specific commentary on the terrible things men do: Frank in Blue Velvet, Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks. When she imagines herself behind that fence with nobody else, she’s imagining a Lynchworld with none of the things (none of the men) that make it nightmarish.
You can argue about the practical merits of a life without men, especially given the number of tag-along males in the audience; even Nokia does a shout-out to her dad near the end of the show, who she calls “one of the good ones” (#notallmen).
But as a fantasy, it’s potent. For two hours, a thousand-some women from their teens to their early thirties are locked together in this dream of girlish isolationism.
Why? Because, as Nokia spits on “Drop Dead Gorgeous” a few songs later, “Men suck/ And they’re only getting worse.” First, there’s a delightful performance of British singer-songwriter Labi Siffre’s “Bless the Telephone” accompanied by an acoustic guitarist — a choice that shows Nokia has a serious musical hinterland, and a singing voice with surprising vulnerability and purity.
Then there’s a costume change into a white dress with matching gloves, and the show takes a darker turn: the songs get harder, the violence closer to the surface.
“Drop Dead Gorgeous” mixes up horror film imagery with beauty practices in a way that makes the latter sound frankly scary. “French tip [manicure], white toes [pedicure], new ass, new tits, new lips, new nose,” she raps, before gleefully declaring herself a “beauty pageant killer”.
“Medusa” is even more unrelenting. Named after a woman who, per the myth, was turned into a gorgon as punishment for being raped, it seethes with fury. Childless and in her thirties, Nokia knows there’s something terrible about her to the incel ideology that’s increasingly crossing into the mainstream, and she chooses the power of being the monster.
“I’m past my expiration date, he call me damaged goods/ I’m the rotten fruit, low hanging in the woods.” As for pronatalism? “I don’t want kids, wouldn’t do it if you paid me/ Refuse to be a servant to the modern day slavery.” When she gets to the chanted threat of the third verse — “male demon, I know what you did, I know what you did” — the crowd joins in. (Well, most of the crowd aside from the men.)
The back-catalogue-heavy last third of the set ends in a riotous performance of the playground chant-style “Tomboy”, easing some of the tension that’s built up. My son declares this the highlight of a great show and takes the misandry in his stride: how frightening can a bunch of girls be?
But there’s something electric in the air that never quite dissipates. Tonight, the girls at Koko know their anger can be delicious, even if they don’t know yet what to do with it.
