Pop punk phenom girlboy J is offering listeners a deep dive into her mental health struggles in her debut single ‘Not Real, Not Here.’ A queer skater making her debut in the music industry, girlboy J’s music stays true to the punk tradition and its defiance by shattering the stigma around mental health struggles. ‘Not Real, Not Here’ is inspired by her battle with PTSD and the sensation of feeling isolated and “not real.”
“The chorus talks about my experience with dissociation, apathy, and PTSD. There were so many periods of my life where I would literally say to people ‘I’m not a real person anymore,’ and everyone thought I was being emo or poetic, but I actually didn’t know how else to phrase what I was going through….Later when I got diagnosed with PTSD, I found out that it is very common for people with it to articulate that they don’t feel real, or that they have this inexplicable feeling that they aren’t living a normal life. It’s like no matter how hard you go through the motions and check off the boxes everyone else is checking off, there is some sort of disconnect–you can’t get back to the effortlessness of existing, you just have to fake it,” shared girlboy J.
Girlboy J is more than just the musical moniker of performer and visionary, Claire Julian – “it is the messiest, weirdest, most vulnerable parts of herself, the parts of ourselves we all have, but often shy away from.” Growing up in New York with an unconventional music background (she picked up drums at age ten, started writing songs before she learned to play guitar or sing, and was raised by parents who had never dipped a toe in the music industry) girlboy J is an East Coast girl who has always had her eyes on LA, the city where she lives now after a brief stint in Miami.
Currently, girlboy J is working on her debut material and developing her sound, which takes the sadboi trap punk of today’s top 100 and immerses it in the female energy that rock n’ roll has been starved of forever. When she isn’t busy making songs (which she usually is), girlboy J is “skating with her homies, talking to her sisters, or having an existential crisis.”
Check the debut track below.