Squirm

The Feeling of Losing Control of Your Own Face

There is a specific, mortifying physical experience that has no dignified name in English: the thing that happens to a body in the presence of someone it wants badly and cannot have, or cannot admit to wanting. The stomach drops, the hands don't know where to go, the mouth says something it didn't mean to say. girli calls that feeling "Squirm," and she builds an entire song around the indignity of it.

"Squirm" is the fourth single from girli's third studio album, "it's just my opinion," arriving in the run-up to the record's May 2026 release on Believe Music^[2][5]. It follows three earlier singles that had already begun sketching the album's mood, and it does so with a lighter, more mischievous touch than its surrounding company^[1].

A Fourth Single, A Different girli

By the time "Squirm" appeared, girli, born Amelia Kate Woodward Toomey and raised in northwest London, had already spent a decade building a reputation for turning her anxieties into pop songs^[4]. She signed to PMR Records in October 2015 as a teenager, released her debut album "Odd One Out" in 2019, was dropped by her label that same year, regrouped with the independent EP "Ex Talk" in 2021, and returned with her second album "Matriarchy" in 2024^[4]. She came out as bisexual at fifteen, at a Tegan and Sara concert that she has credited with pushing her toward music in the first place, and she has spoken openly about living with obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety^[4]. That candor runs through everything she has released since.

Before any of that, she was a teenager playing open mics under her given name, Milly Toomey, and fronting a short-lived indie rock band called Ask Martin before her bandmates left for university and she kept going alone^[4]. She spent two years at East London Arts & Music college developing an interest in beatmaking, rap, and drum and bass, an education that shows up in the genre-hopping restlessness of her catalog, from bubblegum-pop hooks to pop-punk snarl to rap-adjacent cadences^[4].

"it's just my opinion" marks another turn in that evolution. Where earlier eras of her career leaned into shimmering, maximalist pop production, this album trades some of that gloss for a rawer, more intimate register, described by press covering the rollout as a "girl-next-door" pivot toward grounded, sweaty-venue energy^[3][5]. "Squirm" arrived as the album's fourth single on March 31, 2026, preceded by "Better Undressed," "Slap On The Wrist," and "Romantic Sadness"^[1][2].

The Anatomy of an Unruly Crush

At its core, "Squirm" is about the chaos of wanting someone more than composure allows^[1][2][3]. It is not a song about romance working out, or even about romance being pursued with any confidence. It is a song about the interval before any of that, the point where attraction has tipped past charm and into something closer to obsession, where every glance and stray thought starts running its own agenda independent of what the narrator would prefer to feel^[2].

One detail sharpens the stakes considerably. At least one outlet covering the single's release describes the crush at the song's center as complicated by an existing relationship, meaning the narrator is not simply nursing an innocent infatuation but grappling with wanting someone she is not supposed to want^[1]. That framing recasts the title's physical discomfort as something closer to guilt dressed up as butterflies, the squirm of a conscience as much as a body.

Whether or not that reading holds for every line, the emotional logic tracks with how girli describes losing her grip on her own behavior around this person. The song leans fully into the awkwardness and the humor of that loss of control, rather than trying to dress it up as something more composed or flattering^[2].

The title itself does a lot of work here. "Squirm" is not a word typically reached for in a love song. It belongs more naturally to descriptions of discomfort under scrutiny, the fidgeting of someone caught in a lie or pinned by an uncomfortable question. Borrowing that vocabulary for a crush suggests the narrator experiences her own desire less as romance and more as exposure, as though wanting this person has put her under a spotlight she never asked to stand in. The song's two-and-a-half-minute runtime^[5] reinforces that sense of something short, involuntary, and slightly out of the narrator's hands, more like a reflex than a decision.

Humor as Armor

What keeps "Squirm" from tipping into anguish is girli's instinct for comedy. Across her catalog, she has made a habit of naming uncomfortable feelings, whether anxiety, obsessive patterns, queerness, or heartbreak, out loud and often with a wink, rather than letting them fester in private^[4]. "Squirm" extends that instinct to infatuation, treating the listener to the spectacle of someone fully aware of how ridiculous she is being and unable to stop anyway^[2][3].

That self-awareness is the song's real subject as much as the crush itself. It is less interested in convincing the listener that this attraction is deep or destined than in documenting, with comic precision, what it does to a person's nervous system. The vulnerability is real, but it arrives with a smirk attached.

This is a fairly consistent move for girli, whose early singles announced themselves with deliberately blunt, confrontational titles and whose subsequent work kept circling back to the gap between how she is supposed to feel and how she actually feels^[4]. "Squirm" is a smaller, funnier entry in that same project. It does not claim to have anything profound to say about love. It is more interested in cataloguing the absurd, embarrassing, entirely relatable physical toll of it.

The Sound of Sweaty-Venue Confidence

Producer Jack Bowden built the track around bass, electric guitar, keyboards, and synthesizer, layering in handclaps and a driving dancefloor beat that gives the song its nervous, propulsive energy^[1][2][5]. Critics covering the single have reached for the phrase "indie-sleaze" to describe its distorted guitars and scrappy, danceable groove, a sound built for small, packed rooms rather than arenas^[1][3].

That production choice mirrors the song's emotional content. The beat does not let the listener sit still any more than the narrator can. It channels the same restlessness the lyrics describe into something physical and danceable rather than mopey^[3]. For an artist whose earlier work drew more heavily on bubblegum pop and rap-adjacent production, the shift toward rock-leaning, guitar-driven alt-pop on this track is part of the same broader pivot defining the album around it^[4][5].

Why It Resonates

girli has spent her career being unusually direct about the parts of emotional life most pop songs smooth over, whether that is anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or the messiness of queer desire^[4]. "Squirm" applies that same candor to a feeling almost everyone recognizes and almost no one likes to admit to: wanting someone so much it makes you worse at being a person for a while.

Within "it's just my opinion," an album largely preoccupied with longing and mental health, "Squirm" functions as one of the record's more laid-back, playful entries, a moment of comic relief that still takes its subject seriously^[1]. Its release also arrived alongside plans for girli's first tour in two years, including intimate UK record store and venue dates and a run of North American shows beginning at Brooklyn's Baby's All Right, a reminder that this era of her career is as much about reconnecting with a live audience as it is about a new sound^[3].

There is also something specifically satisfying about hearing an artist this candid about anxiety and identity turn that same honesty toward something as low-stakes, in the grand scheme, as a crush. girli's back catalog has tackled bullying, disordered thinking, and the difficulty of being visibly queer in public life^[4]. Against that backdrop, a song about squirming through eye contact with someone you like feels almost like a relief, both for the artist and for a listener who has spent an album's worth of tracks sitting with heavier material.

A Crush, or Something More Complicated?

Coverage of "Squirm" is not entirely unanimous about what, exactly, is at stake for its narrator. Some framings treat it as a straightforward account of an overwhelming, spiraling crush, full stop^[2][3]. Others suggest the attraction is complicated by a relationship the narrator is already in, which would make the song less about butterflies and more about betrayal, or at least the fear of it^[1].

That ambiguity may be the point. girli has never been a songwriter who resolves her subject matter neatly, and a song about losing control of your own reactions arguably works best when it refuses to specify exactly what those reactions are threatening to undo. Listeners can bring their own context, whether that is a crush on someone unavailable, a crush on someone they already love, or just the universal, undignified experience of wanting somebody so badly it shows.

Conclusion

"Squirm" is a small, funny, anxious song, but it fits neatly into a body of work built on refusing to perform composure that isn't real^[4]. girli has built a decade-long career on saying the uncool thing out loud, and here she applies that same nerve to infatuation, one of the least dignified feelings most people ever willingly return to. The song does not resolve the discomfort it describes. It just makes it danceable.