In June 2015, Hayley Kiyoko released a music video for a song called "Girls Like Girls." It cost approximately twelve thousand dollars to make. Within a year it had over ten million views. The song and video did something that almost nothing in mainstream pop had done before it: placed a queer teenage romance at the center of a narrative and treated it with the same emotional seriousness afforded to heterosexual love stories. No camp, no distance, no apology. Just two girls falling for each other at the end of a summer. The directness of it was startling in 2015. It should not have been startling, but it was.
Eleven years later, Kiyoko has written a novel with the same title, directed a feature film with the same title, and released an album titled "girls like girls the album." The film opens in theaters on June 19, 2026. The album arrived on June 13, one week before. The three things exist in relationship with each other, forming a total world around a single emotional premise: that queer first love is not a subgenre of love. It is love. The album is the musical architecture of that world.
What the Novel and the Film Required
Kiyoko has spoken about the source material as drawing on her own memories of adolescence, specifically the summer she was sixteen in Los Angeles when she understood something about who she was attracted to that she had not understood before. The original song was a compression of that understanding into three minutes and fifteen seconds. The novel expanded it into a full narrative arc. The film makes the narrative visual. The album does something different from all three.
Fourteen songs, forty five minutes, featuring a roster of collaborators that is, in itself, a kind of argument. Chelsea Cutler, August Ponthier, Snow Wife, Young Miko, Joy Oladokun, Tegan and Sara, Gigi Perez: this is not a list assembled for algorithmic reasons. It is a list of artists whose own work exists in conversation with the themes Kiyoko is exploring. Artists who have spent their careers writing about love and identity from positions that required courage, or at least a certain refusal to make it easier for their audience.
Tegan and Sara, who appear on "postcard," have been making records about queer experience since before queer pop had a marketing category. Their contribution here is not a legacy gesture. It is a passing of something between two generations of artists who have understood the same thing. Gigi Perez, who appears on "collide," is an artist whose own work deals in the same emotional territory that Kiyoko has staked her entire career on. Young Miko, on "die 4 u," brings a perspective from a generation for whom the battles Kiyoko's 2015 video was waging have been partly won, even if they have not been fully resolved. Joy Oladokun, on "trophy," has spent her career making music about the experience of not fitting neatly into the categories available to you and finding something that functions better than fitting anyway.
The Album Itself
The record opens with "@RollieColey87," a title that lands immediately as the specific idiom of teenage longing: the username of someone you follow and check obsessively. What follows is an album that moves through the emotional topography of a summer, the way that time feels different when you are sixteen and in love for what might be the first time.
"lakeside" and "falling through" are the album's quieter interior moments, songs that exist in the space between what you want to say and what you actually say. "choker" and "red bikini" operate in the register of physical awareness, the way first love is always also a first reckoning with your own body. "nobody should have you," featuring Chelsea Cutler, carries the particular ache of wanting someone who is in some sense already taken, which is one of the oldest narratives in popular music and which lands differently when the wanting itself has historically been framed as transgressive.
The final track is "girls like girls," a new version of the original song or perhaps simply a new song with the same name, returned to after a decade to be understood differently. That decision is structurally meaningful. The original song is the premise. The album is the proof. What Kiyoko is arguing, across fourteen tracks and three media formats, is that the premise was never limited. It was always a story big enough to hold everything she has put into it.
What It Means to Make the Thing You Needed
One of the consistent threads in Kiyoko's interviews about this project is the idea of making the record she needed when she was sixteen. That is a familiar creative ambition: the work as a gift to a past self that had no access to it. What distinguishes Kiyoko's execution of this idea is the scale of the project and the precision of the execution.
The song came first. Then the following that the song created. Then the recognition that the following was itself evidence of a need: that millions of people had been waiting for a story that looked like theirs. The novel and the film and the album are all responses to the same recognition, that the need was large enough to sustain more. None of the three feels like a cash-in on a catalog moment. They feel like what happens when an artist takes the thing that made them who they are and refuses to leave it alone until they have understood it completely.
The result is an album that operates at the intersection of memory, pop craft, and cultural statement without making any of those three things feel like it is in service of the other two. "girls like girls the album" works as world-building, as Kiyoko said it should. It also works as a pop record. And it works as a document of what it meant to be young and queer and in love in a world that was only beginning to learn how to see that.
Kiyoko said the album asks to be heard as world-building first and pop second. That instruction is worth following. The songs reward it.
