Every autumn, Marie Ulven can usually count on listeners returning in droves to We Fell In Love In October, the 2018 track that helped establish her moniker, Girl In Red. This year, the Norwegian songwriter hijacked that seasonal pattern for something different. Before putting out any new music, she modified the artwork on the track, swapping the red sweater for a blue one. That quiet palette switch soon spread across her online accounts, from recoloring the shirt on the Mozart painting in her Instagram avatar to changing her username to @GirlInBlue.
The stunt signaled the arrival of Blue, a new single issued through Columbia Records that ends a quiet stretch running back to the release of her standalone track Hemingway last summer. It marks her first new music in over a year, and it focuses squarely on the unstable, disorienting space left behind after a couple calls it quits. Rather than framing a breakup through high drama, the song sits inside the fallout, tracking the uncertainty and strange emotional drift that set in when two people part ways.
To accompany the single, Ulven returned home to Oslo to shoot a music video with director Isak Jenssen, a visual collaborator she has worked with for years. Their video looks at romantic grief as something persistent, watching how heartbreak marks a person and ultimately dictates who walks out on the other side. Filming in Oslo roots that exploration in familiar territory, matching the unvarnished perspective that Ulven brings to her songwriting.
That brand of candid exposure has become central to her recent work. When Hemingway arrived last summer, Ulven spoke openly about a difficult chapter involving an eating disorder, severe depression, and a struggle with addiction that she explained had nearly killed her. She later told listeners that she had reached a genuinely dark place in her life, and that writing the track was an attempt to translate that harrowing stretch into words.
Reflecting on that release at Glastonbury 2025, Ulven admitted to the anxiety that came with putting such distress on public display. She recalled worrying about how listeners would view her from that point on, specifically fearing that she would be reduced to nothing more than an addict in recovery. Working past that initial sense of shame required a conscious reframe, recognizing that addiction is an authentic illness carrying unfair social stigma, and concluding that people need to speak about it much more openly.
That determination to confront uncomfortable psychological ground is now carrying over into her work outside the studio. Ulven is set to make her acting debut in Low Expectations, a feature film scheduled to reach cinemas across the UK and Ireland in early 2027. Her character, Maja, sees her personal life collapse right at the peak of her music career. Depressed and broke, Maja moves back in with her mother and takes up a part-time job at a local high school, slowly attempting to rebuild an everyday life.
Speaking at Glastonbury, Ulven found direct parallels between acting on a set and playing live on tour. She noted that musicians routinely have to summon heavy feelings on stage even when they are not in the mood for a given song, approaching the concert as a performance. Taking on an acting role demanded the same ability to call up past emotions on cue, maintained across demanding ten to twelve hour working days for a month straight. With Blue now out, Ulven remains dedicated to documenting personal upheaval, letting the honest details lead the way.
