Songfacts®:

• Here, Lizzo toasts female friendship as she shows her love for the women in her life.
• The spelling of "grrrls" isn't new for Lizzo. She titled her 2015 second album Big Grrrl Small World, and her group of backup dancers, the Big Grrrls, consists entirely of plus-size dancers. In March 2022, the eight-part reality competition series Lizzo's Watch Out for the Big Grrrls debuted on Amazon Prime Video. It follows the singer as she puts 13 plus-sized dancers who aspire to be the Big Grrrls of the title through a series of boot camp challenges.
• Lizzo recorded "Grrrls" for her Special album, releasing it as a promotional single on June 10, 2022.
• Lizzo worked with producers Benny Blanco, Blake Slatkin, Ilya, Max Martin, and Pop Wansel on the track. Slatkin co-produced Special's lead single, "About Damn Time." "Grrrls" is Lizzo's first collaboration with Blanco, Ilya, Martin and Wansel that she's released.
• The recurrent sample heard throughout the song comes from Beastie Boys' "Girls," a track from their 1986 debut album Licensed to Ill.
• I'ma spazz
  I'm about to knock somebody out, yo, where my best friend?
  
  Over in the UK, Lizzo got flak for her use of the word "spaz." The term comes from the word "spastic," a historical reference to people with movement disorders such as cerebral palsy. While in the US "spaz" is used to describe someone with a great deal of uncontrolled energy, on the other side of the pond it's considered a term of abuse for disabled people.
  
  Apparently unaware of its negative connotations, Lizzo re-recorded the ableist slur in the song. She changed it to:
  
  Hold me back
  I'm about to knock somebody out, yo, where my best friend?
  
  Lizzo claimed she'd never heard "spaz" used as a slur against disabled people. "The music I make is in the business of feeling good and being authentic to me," she told Vanity Fare. "Using a slur is unauthentic to me, but I did not know it was a slur."
  
  "It's a word I've heard a lot, especially in rap songs," Lizzo continued, "and with my Black friends and in my Black circles: It means to go off, turn up. I used [it as a] verb, not as a noun or adjective. I used it in the way that it's used in the Black community. The Internet brought it to my attention."
• The title isn't completely original: The English singer-songwriter Kate Nash released a song in 2010 titled "Kiss That Grrrl."