“Crashing out” is what happens when your brain finally hits the group chat with a “lol I’m out.” It’s the emotional equivalent of closing all your tabs, lying face down on the floor, and letting the existential dread marinate. It often looks like crying in front of the mirror with a pair of scissors and uneven bangs, ghosting from socials, or finally admitting you’re tired of pretending to have it all figured out. In Marcelina’s case, it describes the moment she stopped resisting uncertainty and allowed herself to collapse into it. That collapse, paradoxically, is what cleared the way for clarity, and Stargirl is what emerged from the wreckage. “The EP is inspired by the moment I fully realized my life’s purpose after feeling lost for a while,” the artist told MILLE.
The Dubai-based Lebanese singer, who is trained in theater and holds a Master’s in intellectual property law, credits a plant medicine experience with helping her reconnect to a long-dormant part of herself. That moment of clarity became the seed for her second musical project—one that now marks her official return to music following her 2021 EP, Infinity.
“The concept came to me during a prophetic plant medicine experience,” the 24-year-old tells us, completely unbothered. “Stargirl is a prophecy of my true essence, of what I’m here to do. Each track feels like a fragment of that inner journey, shining light on my heartbreaks, escapism, rage, silliness… Mostly, the intense lover girl inside me. I created an electronic soundscape and built my own universe. Everything about it is intentional. This EP is the skeleton, the foundation for where I’m heading next with my sound,” she added.
Dropping on August 15, Stargirl is a genre-fluid, emotionally dense work that defies easy classification. A mix of English and Arabic lyrics moves through club focused tempos and textured electronic layers, but the throughline is introspection. Marcelina worked closely with engineer Karim Diaâ and Berlin-based producer SEVEN JAMES, particularly on the tracks Sakakkeen and Rlly Rlly Bad. Though the sonic palette leans toward the atmospheric, the storytelling is sharp and grounded. Her first single Gxth, she says, “feels like the purest expression of my sound.”
The rollout for the EP began last month with Gxth, followed by the release of Sakakkeen, a trancey, hyperpop-laced track built on an infectious beat and a masterful collage of glitch. The track itself is urgent, and slightly disorienting: qualities that echo throughout the rest of Stargirl.
Her third single, It Was Dark In London, is a confessional freefall of desire, disillusionment, and self-reinvention. The lyrics drift between cities, lovers, and late-night vices, tracing the restless loop of wanting something that unravels you. Anchored by mantras like “I keep falling,” it reads like an intimate diary entry set to hypnotic production.
At 24, Marcelina is still at the beginning of her musical career, but her creative instincts have been developing for over a decade. Raised in California, she began her artistic life in theatre before transitioning into music as a teenager. She was, as she puts it, a deeply emotional child—imaginative, intuitive, and always paying attention to what others were feeling.
“I was an intense and sensitive kid,” she recalls. “I was living in my own fantasy world, super tuned into emotions— mine and everyone else’s. I started off acting, which was my first passion growing up in LA, but I was always drawn to music and the way lyrics made me feel seen. I was really shy about singing until I turned 16. I have a journal of songs I started writing in 2009. It’s wild how much I romanticized everything at a young age. I was always a dreamer. I felt like I had an ego death at 12,” she states matter-of-factly.
Her musical identity is shaped by contrast and contradiction. The emotional directness of her lyrics sits against experimental production choices. She’s drawn to romantic imagery, but uninterested in sentimentality. The balance between what’s raw and what’s theatrical defines much of her work.
“It’s both,” she says, when asked whether her lyrics are autobiographical or fictional. “I think I use fantasy as a way to tell the truth. I’m building a character, but that character is me, just amplified, more glamorously wounded, more unhinged. But always me. Lyrically, I feel like I’m holding a mirror up to my real life and saying: What if this heartbreak was a myth? What if this confusion was holy?”
The result is a project that reads like a portrait made of fragments. It’s beautiful, unsettling, and nonlinear. There’s no clean resolution, but that’s part of the point. She doesn’t write songs to tidy things up; she writes them to live alongside the mess.
That openness extends to her cultural identity as well. The artist doesn’t use her heritage as a creative selling point, but she doesn’t separate it from her music either. Some songs lean more heavily into Arabic sounds or phrasing, others don’t. But the influence is always present, even if only subconsciously.
“I think I subconsciously pull from my Lebanese roots,” she explains. “There’s something about Arabic music that lives in the body, in the ear. When you grow up with it, it tunes your instincts in a way that’s hard to explain. Growing up in LA exposed me to so much indie and trap music, and that contrast really shaped my ear too. But I wouldn’t say I’m intentionally trying to place my cultural identity into my music, it just exists in some songs more than others. Cultural identity and music have a symbiotic relationship.”
When speaking about her place in the broader music scene, she avoids grand narratives or declarations. She isn’t trying to carve out a genre or invent a movement. Instead, she sees herself as contributing to what’s already unfolding—a moment in music that’s increasingly defined by hybridity and ambiguity.
“I feel like I’m contributing to a world of infinite musical possibilities that already exists,” she says. “We’re living in such an eccentric and special era of music. This past year, everything has felt like it’s aligning for me in a really powerful way. I’m finally tapping into myself without all the inner and outer noise that used to cloud me while creating. There’s no blueprint for what I’m doing. That used to feel overwhelming, but now it excites me.”
Her list of influences reflects that freedom. She names John Maus, The Cure, Beach House, Dean Blunt, Bassvictim, and Aphex Twin as her Mount Rushmore of music. She’s drawn to artists who exist at the edges of genre, and her own list of dream collaborators—Suzy Sheer, Chicken Munch, James Rand, 2Hollis, Effie, Palmistry, Boy Harsher, Elusin—aren’t household names, but they signal a desire to remain creatively aligned with artists operating on the fringes and who prioritize experimentation over mainstream appeal.
At the same time, she’s acutely aware of the pressures that come with being a young Arab woman in music, particularly as she tries to expand her presence in European and international circles. She doesn’t pander to expectations, nor does she try to overcorrect. Instead, she meets the moment on her own terms. “I’m not here to shrink myself or be digestible—you can choke,” she jokes. The words land not as provocation, but as refusal to flatten herself or soften the edges of her voice to make others more comfortable.
For Marcelina, music is an extension of her psyche. “I create music and build worlds to express parts of myself that I couldn’t share in any other way. Songwriting is such a powerful tool. I really feel like I am a word collector. Music is so powerful, it is like an endless web of emotion and expression, whether soft or confrontational. Every time I listen, or write, it shifts something in me. I really believe that nothing exceeds the power of music; its magical ability to simultaneously liberate and destroy me.”
Looking ahead, Marcelina sees her sound moving even deeper into electronic territory, what she describes as “ethereal rave music with post-punk influences, more electronic sounds, trap and tranceeeeeeeee.” The drawn-out vowel is less a joke than a gesture toward the kind of immersive, all-consuming experience she wants her music to offer. A space where emotion doesn’t need to be explained to be understood.
But more than anything, she wants her music to be felt. Not in a superficial sense, but in the deeper way certain songs have the power to mark time. “I hope my lyrics mean something to them because my words mean so much to me,” she says. “I hope they feel like by listening, they can tune into unhealed or barren parts of themselves. I hope that one day, my music can bring someone back to a bittersweet part of their life, where it almost hurts to listen—hurts so bad but in such a good way.”
In a world obsessed with polish and perfection, Stargirl is a breath of fresh air. Marcelina isn’t chasing virality or trying to be a voice for anyone but herself, and yet, in doing so, she’s becoming one.
