‘girls like girls the album’ review: Hayley Kiyoko’s memory mix

Eleven years ago, Hayley Kiyoko shot a four-minute video about two girls kissing in a swimming pool, and a generation of queer kids treated it like a door. They walked right on through it. And some of them came out the other side as themselves. So the quiet marvel of girls like girls the album, which lands the same week as Kiyoko’s feature directorial debut, lies in how completely it understands that history. The record works as a memory machine, tuned to return its listeners to the exact bedroom carpet where they first learned something true about who they wanted.

That framing is crucial, actually. Because the album asks to be heard as world-building first and pop second. 14 tracks, 45 minutes, a guest list (Tegan and Sara, Young Miko, Gigi Perez, Chelsea Cutler, Joy Oladokun) arranged like wedding guests for a marriage that happened a decade ago.

It opens, cheekily, with “@RollieColey87,” an AIM-handle interlude that drops us into the film’s 2006 of away messages, dial-up longing, devotion typed in lowercase. The conceit charms, but it also tips Kiyoko’s hand. This album lives downstream of the movie, and it wants you to feel the current pulling. Kiyoko directs the film too, and she produces the album’s emotional logic the way she shoots. So in glances, in a hand left on a thigh, in the language of silence she’s called the native tongue of growing up closeted.

Reaching with confidence.

When these songs reach for craft, they reach with confidence. “nobody should have you,” featuring Chelsea Cutler, captures the claustrophobic greed of teenage want, the way a crush shrinks the whole world to one bedroom and the one body inside it. “periwinkle princess”— already the early fan-favorite deep cut, and deservedly — turns first love into demolition. So all hot-wired cords and kicked-up dirt, Kiyoko stumbling drunk toward someone she means to love correctly.

“choker” builds a fetish-object out of memory, plastic lace standing in for a girl she betrays every time she shuts her eyes beside someone else. These songs stay vivid, specific, embodied. And they remember that desire lands best as detail.

Oftentimes a record like this springs a familiar critical trap. The one where significance gets mistaken for greatness. Kiyoko has always lived inside that gap. Expectations was a promising debut where the cultural weight mostly outran its songwriting. Panorama was less successful, its reverse-engineered pop desperately needing more pulse. That history hovers here, and at its softer moments the album earns the echo.

Finding its feet.

“red bikini,” a maximalist horny-summer team-up with Snow Wife, stacks lemon-lychee and Lamborghini imagery onto a chorus content to chant its own title. “lakeside” and “falling through” drift past as pure mood. It’s pleasant and faintly anonymous, the soundtrack glue holding louder set pieces in place.

Still, the album keeps finding its feet exactly where it leans into its own mythology. “die 4 u” hands the second verse to Young Miko, for starters. And the slide into Spanish throws the song open like a window, two queer artists trading vows across a border that becomes a bridge. “postcard,” with Tegan and Sara, treats grief as a shopping habit, buying release and taping keepsakes to a wall. It lets a duo who built a career on this precise ache bless the younger artist raised on them.

“collide,” the Gigi Perez duet released as the lead single, remains the strongest case on offer:  hushed, atmospheric, two voices splitting and overlapping until the title turns literal. Perez’s indie-folk grit anchors Kiyoko’s airy float almost effortlessly. And the result feels lived-in rather than licensed.

Screaming inside.

That leaves the title track, rerecorded “from the motion picture,” which works less as a song than as a homecoming. The real story seems to be of grown adults greeting their 14-year-old selves, screaming inside. One could reasonably hear brand extension in the gesture. While another hears the room growing larger. Kiyoko, shrewd as ever, has built an object roomy enough to house both takes at once. The cover sinks her underwater, and the metaphor suits a record this submerged in its own past.

The honest verdict sits in the middle, perhaps. Which is admittedly where Kiyoko’s work tends to sit and where, this time, she seems glad to stay. In that respect, girls like girls  the album triumphs as continuity and as gift. As a Pride-month thank-you note to the audience that turned a pool-party kiss into a decade-long universe.

As a leap forward for Kiyoko the songwriter, it stays modest and happy to decorate rooms she already framed and furnished. She released it onto a crowded Olivia Rodrigo-themed Friday, after all. But the people she made this for will hear it no matter what. They always do. For them the assignment reads clearly, and Kiyoko — our lesbian Jesus and self-described emotional hoarder both — handed over the exact album worth coming home for.

girls like girls the album is available now.

Images courtesy of KRO Records.