Songfacts®:

• This gender-bending funk jam finds Héloïse Letissier, a.k.a. Christine and the Queens, adopting a masculine swagger in a relationship.
  
  Girlfriend – don't feel like a girlfriend
  But lover – damn, I'd be your lover
  
  "I initially set out to smash against macho culture and macho men," Letissier said. "I became obsessed with this idea of the macho man, and still being a woman. 'What does it mean if I'm this figure, and I'm a woman? Does it make me an aberration? Is it joyful?'"
  
  "I felt I had to address female desire and it's diversity," she added. "How sometimes it's blacked out or ignored. It's still something quite suspicious or slightly dirty. I felt like it was important to be more unapologetic about that."
  
  "There are hints of nights spent having sex and coming back covered in sweat", Letissier continued. "Like a male figure, the young hero who has love stories, and comes back in the morning and his friends are like: 'What happened to you?' I want to be that."
• The song was released on May 17, 2018. The French version titled "Damn, dis-moi," was also dropped on the same date.
• "Girlfriend" features Dâm-Funk a funk musician, vocalist and producer from Pasadena, California. He has also worked with Snoop Dogg and Ariel Pink.
• The song's music video was filmed by Los Angeles born and raised director Jordan Bahat, who has also worked with, amongst others, Twenty One Pilots, Fitz and the Tantrums and Grouplove. The visual starts with Héloïse Letissier dangling in the air from construction equipment, a shot inspired by Charles Ebbets' 1930s photographs of builders relaxing on girders dozens of stories up in the air, Later there is dancing choreography referencing both West Side Story and Michael Jackson's "Bad."
• Time magazine ranked this as their best song of 2018. They wrote:
  
  "Flexing lyrically over a Michael Jackson–inspired beat, Letissier wrestles with, and ultimately rejects, gender norms. In the process, she proves that pop's boundaries can be just as fluid as identity - if only we are bold enough to assert ourselves as she does."
  
• Mojo magazine asked Lettissier how this song was born. She replied:
  
  "It came out of a real love of collage. I love Serge Gainsbourg's 'Love on the Beat': he's on top of a really 80s New York sound, singing about sex. It's like something that shouldn't have happened but it did and it's wonderful. And I thought, 'What if I do a really American, almost generic sound, and I'm putting French on top of it?' I'm using classic G-funk to be really precise about my anger."
• "Girlfriend" was Mojo magazine's track of the Year for 2018. Letessier told Mojo: "It feels really rewarding. For me, I'm not the villain in the song but it is me working on a new defiance. 'Girlfriend' was the first time I lashed out - the address and the tone is really different from the first album. I had thought, 'Will people totally hate that from me? Or will they just embrace the slight humor of it?' It was like a bet I made, but it was a cool thing to do as a performer, to emancipate (myself) a bit through that track."