When alt-pop duo Dolores Forever perform their 2024 single Someday Best, a spirited anthem about living your best, carefree life, their fans go wild for one lyric in particular: “Shut up and eat the pasta!” Now emblazoned across Dolores Forever T-Shirts, it’s a line that perfectly captures the infectiously playful, unapologetic feminist energy at the heart of the London-based band, made up of songwriters Hannah Wilson and Julia Fabrin, who met at a house party in 2018 and instantly became friends.
This friendship has underpinned the band’s whirlwind rise since releasing their first single, Kilimanjaro, in 2021, creating the safety for them to write unflinchingly honest and humourously relatable lyrics about relationships, mental health, and existential angst. In 2022 they released two back-to-back EPs (Baby Teeth and Conversations With Strangers), and, despite having played just three live shows, were invited to perform at Glastonbury. By 2023 Rolling Stone UK and NME had marked them as ‘ones to watch’, they sold out their first headline show at Omeara and released a third EP, I Love You But You’re Making Me Sad.
Now, they’re ready to release their hotly anticipated debut album, It’s Nothing, which they describe as a “punchy indie-pop record about feminism, friendship and navigating a messed up world.” Remaining defiant in a society that prizes “the magic of youth and girlhood”, Dolores Forever represent the power of “womanhood” in all its complexity. “It blows our minds that the music industry is obsessed with hearing from people who are just 21. As we’ve gotten into our thirties, we have so many more stories, and so much more to say.”
The album in part harnesses what they mischievously describe as their shared “feminine rage”, inspired by the last 10 years weathering unfair treatment as female songwriters in a male-dominated industry. Julia, from Copenhagen, co-wrote the winning 2013 Eurovision entry for Denmark, Only Teardrops, while Hannah, from London, has written with Kylie and Stormzy. “I mean, even the fact that female songwriters are very rarely put in the studio together because male producers think that they’ll be bitchy to each other is telling” says Hannah.
“Or take our Spotify bio, in which we describe ourselves as 'like Fleetwood Mac without the husbands',” adds Julia. “We have received so many messages from men telling us not to mention ourselves in the same breath as them, or to point out that they weren’t even married!” Hannah laughs with exasperation. “It’s a joke, oh my God!”
For both women, transitioning from songwriting for other people to becoming, as Julia describes, “the artist, the actual commodity”, has been difficult. “People are saying, stand there, do that, be funnier, could you smile a bit more? Could you be a little less difficult?” says Hannah. “And yet I am a grown arse woman!”
Crucially, their friendship has enabled the pair to turn such frustrations into art that connects deeply with their audiences, creating moments of genuine camaraderie within their joyous and intimate live shows. “A safe place to put our feminine rage!” jokes Hannah. When listening to the fiery Thank You For Breathing, about “trying to be gracious, slamming your head against the wall”, you can just picture delighted fans headbanging to the anthemic chorus in solidarity.
Their friendship, says Hannah, “really is the band’s life blood. Women connect with each other on this amazing level, even in adulthood, and we wanted to make adult female friendship a little more visible. And to say, actually, we should value friendships just as highly as romantic relationships.”
As a result, Dolores Forever made the conscious decision to eschew the theme of heartbreak for this album. “We’ve heard enough of those heartbreak songs, we don’t need to perpetuate the idea of women as weak and broken,” says Hannah.
Single Split Lip, for instance, honours their protective instincts as friends. “Like when you see your friend going through something and you just want to stand in front of them and keep them safe,” says Hannah. “It’s saying, ‘Love yourself in the way that I love you’”, smiles Julia.
The song was inspired by each woman’s individual struggles. Julia drew on her experience as a new mother in the music industry, which is “simply not set up for motherhood," she says. "I’ve sat in the tour van and backstage, pumping.” Meanwhile Hannah has found photoshoots and filming videos challenging. “I’m used to being critiqued about my brain and my songs, but I don’t feel good about being critiqued about how I look. And that's the thing that I've had to surrender to, in being an artist, that I never wanted to.”
The song is so meaningful that sometimes Hannah is unable to perform it live without “getting a bit teary.” In fact, she says, “it’s probably the most sincere song on the album. And every time we perform it I think, ‘Thank God we have each other.’”
Also tackling body image, the sad banger single Go Fast Go Slow has one of the band’s favourite opening lines: “I’ve hated this body since I was ten”. The song, says Hannah, is “us facing up to expectations of women, in terms of our bodies, and how there is this huge pressure on people to accept themselves. Oh so now suddenly we all have to love ourselves, despite being told to hate ourselves when we were growing up? As if it’s easy.”
Julia nods. “It’s just another unattainable goal. ‘Oh, you don’t love yourself, so what’s wrong with you?’ The goal posts are always changing.”
Hannah describes their lyrics honing in on "emotional grey areas” which are mirrored by their sound. “We’re obsessed with chords and melodies and words, but we want the production to be a little dirty,” says Julia. “Let’s wash out the chorus, add some scuzzy drums.” Both artists will get involved in the production, too. “Our mission is always, can we make it weird but still catchy? Can we make it as weird as possible, then pull it back?”, says Hannah. “There always needs to be a spark; a friction.”
“And musically it's so much more interesting to find a tension between two feelings," adds Hannah. "A devastating lyric to an absolutely banging beat.”
Case in point: songs Why Are You Not Scared Yet? and Not Now Kids, which attempt to make sense of universal feelings of futility and powerlessness in the face of a turbulent world in freefall. “Both of us feel things really intensely, so we tend to find writing a place to process those overwhelming emotions”, says Hannah, who remembers writing WAYNSY during the confusion of the pandemic, while NNK was written earlier this year, when “watching the Tories run the country into the ground, watching horrific war crimes taking place, and feeling utterly helpless”.
Over a tongue-in-cheek sing-song chorus, Not Now Kids pokes fun at patronising politicians thinking they know better: “Not now kids, the grown ups are talking”. Meanwhile Why Are You Not Scared Yet? imagines a bleak dystopian future with mock indifference: “Everybody you know is gonna be dead/But it's OK, we'll have robots/And there'll be no more water left/Just Diet Coke, is that a detox?”
These songs offer catharsis, says Julia, by “exploding into choruses you want to sing and dance to, which is quite liberating.” And, adds Hannah, “acting as a kind of rallying cry. We know we’re not the only ones feeling this way, so we want to create community through song. Plus, if the world is ending, then surely music and art matter more than ever?”
It’s a tension that even inspired the album title. On the one hand, it’s a very female experience to minimise something as ‘nothing’, when it is almost always something. “But then of course because it’s our debut album, it’s not nothing,” says Julia. “Actually, it’s huge.”
