Swap the jangle of Zara Larsson‘s custom charm belt—a fashion staple that stylist Caterina Ospina has built into every stop of the Midnight Sun Tour—for a set of rattling car keys, and you’ve got the album’s deluxe: Girls Trip. Each track on the original record gets handed off to another iconic woman in music—Shakira, Robyn, Tyla, PinkPantheress, Kehlani, JT, Madison Beer, Emilia, Helena Gao, Margo XS, BAMBII, Malibu, and Eli—remixed into something even more fun, more sensual, and honestly more unhinged in the best way, tangling with foreign languages because what’s more fun than picking up a few words from the locals? We’re fairly certain these are going to be screamed out of car windows all summer long.
But a girls’ trip isn’t just a Europe-in-June itinerary sitting in a group chat that nobody’s acted on yet. It’s a rite of passage that women have been pulling off—sometimes quietly, sometimes scandalously—since the 1950s. So we did what felt right: picked five decades, picked five trips, and shotgunned each one with a track from the record.
1950s — The “Permission Slip” Trip
Just like a blue moon is its own phenomenon, the girls’ trip in the 1950s was a rare and quietly radical thing—a beach holiday here, a spa weekend there, never something that had you swiping through your calendar trying to find a free weekend, because most women simply didn’t. But when it did happen? Powder-blue luggage, white gloves, and a sense of giddy transgression just from being somewhere without a husband.
While Zara’s ‘Blue Moon,’ bringing powerhouse Kehlani along for the ride, carries on that blue theme—twisting into starlit nights on California beaches with some crooning serenade swaying in the background—it’s less about the girls and more about the want of a lover. And maybe that’s the point. In the 1950s, even stolen freedom came wrapped in romance. The trip was yours, but you still brought him with you in your head.
1970s — The Liberation Road Trip
Voting pins and discarded kitchen aprons—the feminist movement cleared the road for women in a way it never had before. Think Thelma & Louise energy; a film that just crawled back into the limelight through Sabrina Carpenter’s Coachella performance, where she had both lead actresses voice monologues on each night. Even if women had to do a little more planning than the boys, it was flared jeans, folk music on the radio, and stopping wherever they felt like it.
That freedom didn’t come without its shadow, though. More doors open meant more women in the same room, which meant competition—and that’s where ‘The Ambition’ queues up. A polarizing track about the darker side of being a girls’ girl in an industry that wasn’t built to hold all of you at once. With vocal stunner Madison Beer and retro-influenced BAMBII on the record, the former brings her own complicated relationship with stardom into the room—scouted by Justin Bieber at a young age, later losing her record deal with Scooter Braun, and still here, still dreaming, still going. When X has become a battleground for fans feuding over who gets to wear the main pop girl crown—not realizing there’s one for everyone—can jealousy really not ripen?
1990s — The Bachelorette Trip
Showgirl feathers, plastic cups full of coins for the slot machine, and dodging kisses from an Elvis impersonator while you’re about to marry your boo in a memory-fogged blur—welcome to Vegas. Much like a night that keeps escalating, the rowdy bachelorette party took off somewhere in the ’80s and didn’t get its first official guidebook until 1998; but by the ’90s, sandwiched between Madonna’s promiscuous allure and Britney Spears’s crop tops, the messy girls’ trip stopped being incidental and became an event with a capital E.
And isn’t that exactly what ‘Pretty Ugly’ is? The track features rap goddess JT and Margo XS—fun, golden-shimmering fact: Margo XS co-produced and co-wrote the entire Midnight Sun album. What makes JT’s addition so electric is the detail. She drops spunky little audio effects like a slurping noise, brings a whole new dimension to female rage, and makes it very clear she’s armed when she’s spiraling out. The kind of energy that belongs in Vegas, and nowhere else.
Early 2000s — The Sex and the City City Break
Circle the word “sexy” whenever you see it, because you’re about to get double vision with this decade. Sex and the City‘s Carrie Bradshaw was the early 2000s darling—voluminous golden curls, a witty, sharp pen, and a penchant for clacking her heels against New York City’s pavement. The show completely rewired how women brought travel into the group chat, turning the city into a hotspot with fans flocking to filming locations like Magnolia Bakery to live vicariously through their gossipy lives. And if you’d missed that bubble, the Statue of Liberty didn’t sleep for long—one eye stayed open when a whole new non-judging breakfast club, aka Gossip Girl, rolled into town. The early 2000s girls’ trip was a city break: designer handbags, croissants in Paris, boys in Milan, and the Serena to your Blair glued to your arm and tagged in every photo.
Coupled with Tyla for this remix, ‘Hot & Sexy’ is all about knowing your worth and who deserves to be standing right alongside you when you’re in that effortless glow. Tyla brings zany one-liners—throwing their initials into wordplay with “You gon’ need TMZ for T and Z, scandalous”—and makes it clear their best is nowhere near behind them with “This ain’t even my prime, I’ve been a primadonna.” It’s giving the right city break energy, but make it a penthouse.
2020s — The Wellness Retreat Era
Cucumber over eyelids and nursing a fruity mocktail with a palm tree umbrella swishing around in it—welcome to the 2020s, where your next Bali trip is already pinned to your Pinterest board. It’s sound baths and crystals, hair plaited into braids, and journaling by the pool; less about escaping your life, more about reconstructing it entirely.
And if you’re not a Bali girlie? Don’t fret. Zara and Shakira are opting for a ‘Eurosummer’ instead. In her new verse, Shakira nods to stepping out of the limelight after her 2022 separation from Gerard Piqué—the move to Miami, the reinvention—before slipping into Spanish: “La disco, la playa, la brisa, la noche, Amalfi, Ibiza.” We’ll let Google Translate take the wheel here: “the disco, the beach, the breeze, the night.” The essential nature cues of a very flirty situationship with a European summer.
Who’s your Shakira? Tag them with this article on our socials—Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook—then give Midnight Sun: Girls Trip another loop while you picture the knock of Y2K fluffy dice against your dash and the winding roads of your next getaway.
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