The 2010s File Feature
Most Girls
Hailee Steinfeld's "Most Girls" and the Pop Empowerment Anthem of 2017 Hailee Steinfeld established herself as an actor of unusual maturity with her Academy …
01 The Story
Hailee Steinfeld's "Most Girls" and the Pop Empowerment Anthem of 2017
Hailee Steinfeld established herself as an actor of unusual maturity with her Academy Award-nominated performance in True Grit at the age of fourteen. Her transition into pop music was watched with some skepticism, as the actor-to-pop-star pipeline has a long history of disappointment. "Most Girls," released in June 2017 through Republic Records, went a long way toward silencing that skepticism. The track is a confident, melodically sophisticated pop song that treats its subject matter, the diversity of female experience and the rejection of limiting social scripts, with genuine conviction and without the condescension that sometimes mars songs of its type.
The song was co-written by Steinfeld alongside Aino Jawo, Caroline Hjelt (the duo Icona Pop), Amy Allen, and producers D'Mile and Stint. The collaboration brought together a range of perspectives on female pop songwriting, and the result is a track that feels more collectively authored and less formulaic than many of its contemporaries. The production is bright and kinetic, built around synth-pop foundations with a propulsive rhythm section that creates genuine momentum without overwhelming the vocal performance.
On the Billboard Hot 100, "Most Girls" reached number 78, a chart position that perhaps understates its cultural impact. The song performed considerably more strongly on streaming platforms and on youth-focused formats where Steinfeld's audience was concentrated. In Australia, the song reached number 11, reflecting her strong following in that market. The track accumulated hundreds of millions of streams across major platforms, numbers that positioned it as a genuine hit even if its Hot 100 placing was modest by the standards of the songs it was competing against.
The lyrical conceit of "Most Girls" centers on a deliberate inversion of a common phrase. The expression "she's not like most girls," widely recognized as a backhanded compliment that elevates one woman by diminishing others, is directly challenged throughout the song. The narrator insists that being like most girls is precisely what she is proud of, reframing collective femininity from a limitation into a source of strength and solidarity. This rhetorical reversal was immediately recognized by critics and listeners as the song's most interesting intellectual move.
The music video, directed with a celebratory energy that matched the song's message, featured Steinfeld and a diverse ensemble of performers in various settings that celebrated different aspects of female experience. The video was praised for its visual representation of the song's inclusive message and accumulated over 150 million views on YouTube, a strong performance that indicated the depth of audience engagement with both the song and its visuals.
Critically, "Most Girls" received warm reviews that positioned it favorably within the wave of pop empowerment songs that characterized the mid-2010s. Reviewers noted that Steinfeld's vocal performance had matured considerably since her earlier pop releases, and that the songwriting had a specificity and wit that set it apart from more generic entries in the empowerment pop canon. Several critics specifically praised the song's refusal to construct its heroine's identity through contrast with other women.
The track was released during a period of intense cultural discussion about female representation, the #MeToo movement was building in public consciousness through 2017 and would fully emerge later that year, and "Most Girls" arrived as part of a broader pop cultural reckoning with how women were represented in music and other media. While the song predates the peak of that cultural moment, it was immediately absorbed into discussions about what responsible female-positive pop looked like.
Steinfeld received particular praise for the conviction of her performance, which made the song's message feel genuinely held rather than commercially motivated. Her background as an actor arguably contributed to this quality, as her ability to inhabit a lyrical perspective and make it feel lived-in translated directly from screen to recording studio. The song became a fixture on streaming playlists associated with confidence, self-esteem, and female solidarity, and it remains one of the most-streamed songs in Steinfeld's catalog.
"Most Girls" appeared on Steinfeld's EP Haiz expanded editions and represented a significant step in her development as a pop artist. It demonstrated that she was capable of sustained commercial output that matched the promise of her early releases, including her breakthrough hit "Love Myself" from 2015. The song also revealed a songwriting maturity and a clear artistic perspective that set reasonable expectations for her continued development in the pop space.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of Hailee Steinfeld's "Most Girls": Reclaiming Solidarity
"Most Girls" is a song about dismantling a specific kind of social shorthand. The phrase it targets, "she's not like most girls," has been deployed for decades as a form of praise that simultaneously serves as a form of dismissal, elevating one woman by implicitly degrading the category of women as a whole. Hailee Steinfeld and her collaborators take this phrase and turn it inside out, arguing that the qualities associated with "most girls" are precisely the qualities worth celebrating, that the category itself contains multitudes and that belonging to it is not a limitation but an affiliation worth claiming proudly.
The song works because it resists the temptation to simply replace one narrow definition of female identity with another. Rather than arguing that women who cry at movies are superior to women who don't, or that softness is better than toughness, the song argues for the full range of what women can be and do. The lyrical strategy is additive rather than selective, accumulating images of female experience, from vulnerability to strength, from romance to independence, and presenting them all as equally valid and equally worthy of celebration. This inclusivity is the song's central achievement.
There is also a social critique embedded in the song's argument that is worth taking seriously. The "not like most girls" compliment is a mechanism for fragmenting female solidarity, for encouraging individual women to distinguish themselves from other women rather than recognizing their shared interests and experiences. By refusing that mechanism and insisting on the value of collective identity, the song makes a genuinely political point within a pop format that keeps the argument accessible and emotionally engaging rather than didactic.
Steinfeld's personal history as a young woman navigating an industry that has historically been unkind to women gives her advocacy in the song additional credibility. She began working as an actor as a child, in an environment that placed enormous pressure on female performers to conform to specific ideals, and her insistence on the value of diverse female experience carries biographical weight that makes it feel more than merely performed. The song functions as a statement of values that listeners could reasonably believe she actually holds.
The song's reception demonstrated that there was significant appetite among pop audiences for this kind of positive, solidarity-oriented messaging. Listeners responded not just by streaming the song in large numbers but by sharing it as a statement of personal identity, using it as a soundtrack for social media content that expressed similar values. This kind of active identification, where a song becomes a vehicle for self-expression beyond mere entertainment, is the mark of a track that has genuinely connected with its audience at a meaningful level rather than simply occupying space on a playlist.
"Most Girls" ultimately means what the best songs in the female empowerment tradition always mean: that the experience of being a woman is not a single thing but an enormous and varied landscape of emotion, choice, identity, and possibility, and that this variety is a cause for solidarity and celebration rather than competition or shame. That message, delivered with melodic charm and genuine conviction, is why the song resonated as widely as it did and why it continues to find new listeners years after its release.
→ More from the 2010s File
View all 2010s hits →
Keep digging