girl in red, the moniker of Norwegian singer-songwriter Marie Ulven, is back with her first single of the year. ‘October Passed Me By’ is billed as the sequel to 2018’s ‘We Fell in Love in October’, and Ulven produced it with the National’s Aaron Dessner. The track comes with an accompanying short film directed by Gustav Johansson and starring Norwegian actress Lisa Loven Kongsli and Ruth Vega Fernandes, which premieres at 6pm BST/1pm ET. Watch and listen below.
Discussing the new song, Ulven said in a press release:
October Passed Me By has been living in the back of my head since June 2021. Every fall since I put out we fell in love in October in 2018, I was encouraged to do things on social media to talk about the song again. Making TikToks, Instagram posts and other things about a song I made years ago never felt honest. I’m not in the same place as I was when I wrote the song, emotionally or artistically, so pretending to be so felt boring and uninteresting. So, I never did any of that; but last year something happened in my personal love life that brought up a lot of feelings that I had to confront internally.
I met Aaron Dessner in the fall of 2021. I told him I had this song that I had written and wanted to make but I hadn’t started recording it yet. I had never worked with him, so for me it felt like an interesting and also lowkey thing to try out. I finished writing the song in Oslo and LA, working remotely with Aaron and with my great friend Matias Tellez on mix.
October Passed Me By is where I’m at today, emotionally and musically. Grateful for what has been, and full of love for a very special person that made a huge impact on me as a person. And also, I thought it was way cooler to expand the we fell in love in October universe artistically, rather than making some uninspired videos that will disappear into the black hole of content that is TikTok.
PS: I will probably make TikToks too. lol.
girl in red’s debut album, If I Could Make It Go Quiet, arrived last year.
