The Sheffield-via-punk-rock four-piece have built their opening statement around a concept that is deceptively simple and quietly devastating: the peculiar psychic torture of standing in a crowd watching your boyfriend's band, surrounded by other girlfriends, feeling somehow both invisible and grotesquely overdressed. Most songwriters would milk that for cheap irony or worse, sympathy. Hitlist do neither. Instead, they detonate it.
The song's narrator looks around at these women — immaculate, self-possessed, seemingly native to some higher plane of social ease — and rather than collapse into envy or self-pity, arrives at the most gloriously punk conclusion imaginable: *sod this, I'll get up there myself*. It's a small, furious epiphany, and the band frame it with the kind of muscular, no-messing guitar work that suggests they have been listening to a lot of Elastica in one room and a lot of Shame in another, and have kicked the wall down between the two.
What Hitlist understand, and what so many of their contemporaries conspicuously do not, is that punk was never really about nihilism — it was about impudence. It was about looking at the people who seemed to own the room and deciding, with magnificent rudeness, that the room was yours now. *Girlfriends* crackles with that energy from the first bar. The guitars have the coiled, slightly dangerous quality of something about to go off in your hand. The rhythm section doesn't so much hold the song together as propel it forward at a pace that leaves no room for doubt or second-guessing. And the vocal — raw, sardonic, entirely committed — lands every line with the precision of someone who has been quietly furious about this particular injustice for some time and is only now getting around to saying so out loud.
The L7 comparison on the press sheet is earned. So is Lush, though perhaps less obviously — it's less about the shoegaze shimmer and more about that very specific brand of feminine cool that refuses to perform its own vulnerability for your comfort. Hitlist are not here to be relatable in the Instagram sense. They are here to make noise, as they cheerfully admit, and the noise they make is extremely good.
There is something genuinely exciting about a debut single that knows precisely what it wants to do and then does it without apology or qualification. The music industry in 2026 rewards exactly the opposite — the carefully hedged, the algorithmically softened, the anxiously focus-grouped. *Girlfriends* sounds like it was written in spite of all that, which is the only way anything worth hearing ever gets written.
Played live at Leeds in the City, headlining Sidney & Matilda in Sheffield, already earning column inches in ASBO Magazine — Hitlist are clearly not a band content to sit quietly and wait to be discovered. Good. Quiet bands with something to say are a waste of everyone's time, including their own.
Keep an extremely close eye on whatever they do next. This is just the beginning of what promises to be an uncommonly loud and thoroughly necessary racket.
*Released 13 February 2026 on Monomyth Records*