by project gurl

Project Gurl. “Can't Really Explain It” United Masters, 2023

[Stream HERE] https://linktr.ee/callprojectgurl

Words by Nadine Smith

The origin story of Project Gurl is right there in her name: she’s a girl, with a creative project — specifically a project file on the computer where she creates her music. But the Rhode Island-based artist is more than just a daydreamer or full-time creator. What sets Project Gurl apart is her single-minded drive to bring her visions into reality. 

Instead of expecting others to give her what she needs, she goes out and gets it herself; rather than waiting for the beats to come to her, she pounds them out herself. The mentality is DIY, but her sound is anything but, a polished blend of plugg and trap, with a shade of psychedelic hyperpop vibes. Her debut album can’t really explain it: 2019-early 2022 unfinished music is a direct transmission from her endlessly creative mind. Despite the name, the record is far from a rough draft — by looking back at her recordings from over the past few years, she found a throughline to connect disparate blasts of inspiration. Even though her sound is futuristic and her voice often manipulated, the emotions she expresses remain human and real. 

There’s a pop appeal to her catchy melodies, but Project Gurl’s sensibility is a little more on the experimental side, with an electric unpredictability: she’ll shift the pitch or tempo on a whim, going full chopped & screwed on tracks like “no stress” and “henny in my cup,” while on her synthesizers ooze and swirl like a sonic kaleidoscope. In her daily life, Projet Gurl is an obsessive listener of almost every kind of music you can think of, and that deep love of music, regardless of genre, radiates from her music. Sometimes she breaks into a pop-punk flow, like on “Paranoid” and “tiktok song,” while “life goes” is an introspective ballad. Her lyrics can be flirtatious and sassy, or emo and romantic, but the feelings are always vulnerable. 

Project Gurl’s soundscapes are trance-like and glittering, shimmering and bursting in a synesthetic haze. Her music explodes with energy and sonic possibility, just like her mind bursts with ideas. On songs like “two of us” and “el mundo,” she breaks out a funky reggaeton groove, transporting the listener to a lush tropical beach in outer space. As a bilingual speaker of Spanish and English, Project Gurl effortlessly switches between languages like she does musical styles, each one expressing a different part of herself. Despite the multiple styles she weaves into one, Project Gurl never loses her sense of self, and her non-stop hustle and open mindset fuses it all together.