The 2020s File Feature
One Of The Girls
One Of The Girls — The Weeknd, JENNIE and Lily-Rose Depp's Strange Beautiful Collaboration A Soundtrack Built for Another World The The Idol television proje…
01 The Story
One Of The Girls — The Weeknd, JENNIE and Lily-Rose Depp's Strange Beautiful Collaboration
A Soundtrack Built for Another World
The The Idol television project generated significant cultural friction when it arrived in 2023, drawing both praise for its visual ambition and considerable criticism for its content. Whatever you made of the show itself, its music had an undeniable atmospheric quality that existed somewhat separately from the surrounding controversy. One Of The Girls arrived as part of the soundtrack album The Idol Episode 4 (Music from the HBO Original Series), placing The Weeknd's seductive production instincts alongside the voices of JENNIE, the South Korean solo artist and BLACKPINK member, and Lily-Rose Depp, the actress and model appearing in the series. The combination was unusual enough by any standard that it demanded attention purely on its own terms.
The Weeknd's Extended Universe
Abel Tesfaye had been building toward this kind of multimedia project for years. His music has always operated cinematically, constructing a specific world of nocturnal glamour, moral ambiguity, and emotional extremity that felt like it needed images as much as sound. Albums like After Hours and Dawn FM had already pushed his work toward the narrative and conceptual end of pop, establishing the creative infrastructure that made a television collaboration feel like a natural next step rather than a corporate experiment. Co-creating and starring in The Idol was the logical extension of that long-standing creative impulse: putting his characters on screen rather than only in speakers and headphones. One Of The Girls lives fully inside that world, its production shimmering and slightly threatening, the kind of song that feels like it is happening in a room where you are not entirely certain of the social dynamics or what is expected of you.
Two Unexpected Voices
JENNIE's involvement brought one of K-pop's most globally recognizable solo voices to a Western pop context, and her delivery on the track has the cool, studied detachment that has defined her solo work outside of BLACKPINK. Lily-Rose Depp, meanwhile, brought a breathy fragility that anchored the song's narrative in something considerably more vulnerable. The three voices don't compete for the listener's attention; they describe different positions within the same emotional scenario, creating a kind of triangulated perspective on desire, performance, and belonging that would have been impossible with fewer participants. The collaboration is strange and specific and genuinely interesting as a result.
A Slow Burn on the Charts
The song's chart journey was gradual and patient, entering the Billboard Hot 100 at number 100 on December 30, 2023, then climbing incrementally through the early weeks of 2024. It reached its peak of number 51 during the week of March 9, 2024, spending 20 weeks on the chart in total. That unhurried trajectory reflected how the song moved through audiences: less through radio saturation or immediate viral moments and more through sustained playlist and algorithmic placement that rewards production quality and atmospheric distinctiveness over time. The song's global reach was apparent in its streaming geography: JENNIE's fanbase in Asia and Europe contributed substantially to the total play count, making this genuinely one of the more internationally sourced chart entries of the period. Over 271 million YouTube views confirmed an audience reaching well beyond the Hot 100's domestic framework.
Beyond the Controversy
The cultural conversation around The Idol was contentious and at times exhausting, but separating the music from the discourse reveals a genuinely interesting sonic object that holds up on its own merits. One Of The Girls is polished, emotionally slippery, and atmospherically strange in ways that reward repeated listening over time. The result feels like a document of a specific moment when the lines between K-pop, Western prestige television, and legacy mainstream stardom had blurred enough that this particular collaboration was simply possible. Let it play and decide for yourself what it all amounts to.
“One Of The Girls” — The Weeknd, JENNIE & Lily Rose Depp's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
One Of The Girls and the Performance of Belonging
The World of The Idol
One Of The Girls exists within the specific emotional universe of The Idol, a world preoccupied with image, manipulation, desire, and the transactional nature of celebrity at its most extreme. Understanding the song fully requires at least a passing familiarity with that context: the characters in the show navigate a pop-music industry where authenticity is always a performance and vulnerability is either weaponized against you or exploited for someone else's benefit. The song captures those themes in compressed, sensory form without needing the show's full dramatic apparatus to communicate its essential feeling.
The Price of Inclusion
The title phrase carries a double weight worth sitting with. Being one of the girls in this song's world is both a privilege and a condition: you gain access, proximity to power, a kind of belonging that feels genuinely real. But the belonging comes with costs that are left deliberately unspecified and therefore more unsettling than any explicit terms would be. The narrator finds herself drawn into an orbit she didn't fully choose, or if she chose it, the choosing happened before she fully understood what was actually on offer and what would be required in return. That ambiguity is characteristic of The Weeknd's songwriting at its most interesting.
Three Voices, Three Perspectives
The structural choice to give voice to three distinct performers reflects the song's thematic interest in multiple positions within a single relational dynamic. JENNIE's delivery carries a kind of knowing restraint, Lily-Rose Depp's brings a more exposed and emotionally raw quality, and The Weeknd's vocals connect the two through his characteristic blend of seduction and barely concealed moral unease. Together they describe a complete ecosystem of desire and power rather than a single viewpoint, which makes the song considerably more complex than its lush and beautiful surface initially suggests to casual listeners.
The Glamour and Its Underside
The production's beauty is itself part of the meaning rather than just decoration. The glistening surfaces and warm sonic textures represent the appealing exterior of the world the song describes, the version designed to draw people in and hold them there. Underneath those surfaces, the emotional content is considerably more fraught with complication and unease. This gap between how things look and how they actually feel is central to The Weeknd's artistic project across his entire catalog, and One Of The Girls extends it into a multimedia context where visual and sonic elements reinforce each other deliberately.
Desire Without Certainty
What the song ultimately refuses to resolve is whether the narrator wants to be where she is or simply finds herself there and has decided to make the best of it. That unresolved quality mirrors the experience of navigating environments of intense social competition: you pursue access, achieve it, and discover that the inside looks nothing like the outside did, and that you are now required to perform a version of yourself that fits the space you've entered. One Of The Girls describes that experience without judging it, which gives it psychological honesty beneath all the glamour.
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