In Conversation x Hannah Grae
Has being a “girls girl” blunted our honestly with oursleves and is being a bitch our way back?
Words & Interview by: Evie Summers
Hannah Grae is baring all, and it might be just the confession we all desperately need.
The Welsh songstress has had an impressive past 5 years, from creating perspective shifted covers on TikTok to releasing an EP and album that have found widespread success, but after taking a break and returning to her hometown a whole new, more honest and confronting Hannah is emerging. Has her time away and her newfound independence brought out a whole new side?
Her most recent single bitch details the often complex and turbulent relationship we as women have with success and each other. Her lyrics masterfully paint the picture of the immense turmoil that arises from coveting the life and achievements of the women around her while battling her desire to see those same rivals succeed.
“There's such a guilt about, like, comparing yourself to another woman, specifically because there's such a solidarity that I feel like most of us feel,” she remarked when talking Original through how the song came about.
“How can that happen for them and not for me right now?” It's such a deeply relatable sentiment but verbalising it can open you up to a whole host of recourse both internally and societally.
This idea is often met with a kind of contempt for betraying the women around you for coveting them. Hannah knows this and isn't bowing to that fear. She laments on this sentiment, “there is a conflicting thing inside, so like, I don't want to feel this. I feel like a bitch. Basically.” There is a policing about how we must as women and girls interact with negative feelings that even now, doesn't seem to have gone away, just got re-packaged.
In recent years, the term " girls' girl” has exploded in the zeitgeist and has become a constant fixture of online discourse for women. With its expansion in our lexicon, there's been a comparable expansion in its societal capital. Being -or rather not being- a so-called ‘girls' girl’ has fast become the sole determinant for a woman's character. You're either a girl's girl or you're.... well, a bitch
Instead of being a reminder of solidarity, it has come to feel like a tool for policing women's expression of feeling. Jealousy (envy, even) is totally normal, albeit not kind, a feeling; we lose something inherently human when we start limiting our ability, as artists and people, to express it because it may be ugly.
Hannah's track is confronting feelings that go far beyond simple jealousy. She is targeting our proclivity to resent those we see as better and, in turn, to self-destruct.
Skilfully employing images of a physical, visceral struggle with lines like “You make me wanna rip my own damn eyes out, can you hear me screaming from the background, I wanna be you.” It is this lyrism that demonstrates the anguish of living in the shadow of those you see as greater. There's something incredibly visceral and human about maming urself to avoid moral failure.
As women, there is often this inarticulate notion that kudos is finite; to have it is to deprive another woman and vice versa. Vying against those around you for acknowledgement is like slowly suffocating. Clawing at yourself and others in a desperate attempt to feel valued, and Hannah ensures we feel every word of it.
“I genuinely want all of the women in my life to be super successful and to get everything that they want because they're incredible. But then there's this thing inside me that's looking at, especially when I'm, you know, going through something like everyone does. When I'm in like the lower parts, and I'm looking at the people around me, they're just like, oh, I wish.”
The song is graphic and raw; pair it with Hannah's incredible, powerful voice, and the piece is both relatable and exposing in a way that leaves the audience just a little more seen than maybe we care to admit.
But this isn't as easy to admit as the artist candor may lead you to believe, Hannah spoke of her process writing such intense songs, “I think I always find it easier to write after I work through something, you know, I have written some songs that I love that have been in the moment, but I find them harder because it's harder to admit how I feel in the moment” what makes such complex feelings difficult to deal with effectively is their need for retrospect, we look to artists like Hannah Grae to say all of the things we feel and hate ourselves for thinking.
Turning to a more personal perspective, Hannah openly admits, “I've always found it really difficult to journal as well. Like, I would love to just be able to go and sit in a park and write about my feelings, whereas you can't do it. I just open the page, and then I start lying to myself.”
The call for women to perform this constant piety even in private is like any other expectation of performance for women- just kind of unfair. Everything about the work feels like a final break in performance; a recount of a breakdown, clothes and mess strewn around the dim room, Hannah abandons all illusions of decorum and forced respectability. We sit with her, relishing in the fury; her videographic and directorial skills make sure of it.
There is a refreshing, intimate and self-indulgent quality in the lyrics, witnessed alongside the visuals of Hannah in her disheveled bedroom; we feel as though we are coming straight out of a particularly frustrated rumination or a page of her diary – it is bold and fiery and deeply cathartic. Cathartic in a way that is often shunned for women as embarrassing or unattractive.
We should be able to admit were jealous without being accused of hating other women, bitch is that confession, in the quiet of our bedrooms at our wits end maybe we can all use bitch as our moment of therapy and stop feeling so guilty that we are people- who heaven forbid- have an ugly feeling once in a while. Hannah is leading the charge of honesty as we stride into 2026, to the soundtrack of ‘bitch’.