Florence Welch Teases Cover of No Doubt’s ‘Just a Girl’ For ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2
Florence Welch is ready to join team Yellowjackets by diving into a portal back to 1995. The + the Machine singer teased her contribution to the upcoming second season of the Showtime drama about a girls’ soccer team stranded in the wilderness — and the inescapable echo of the horrifying things that happened there that haunts their adult lives — with a short Instagram teaser on Monday (March 6).
In the clip, Welch is backstage flipping through a wardrobe featuring the expected array of pastel-colored, gauzy dresses as a spooky piano theme plays in the background before she gets to a Team Yellowjackets varsity jacket. “So happy I got picked for the team this year,” reads the caption to the post.
Most crucially, as Welch gets ready to join the squad, her band’s frantic cover of No Doubt’s iconic breakthrough ’95 hit, “Just a Girl,” bubbles up. Whereas the original Gwen Stefani-led track was a bouncy, ska-tinged pop smash about female empowerment, in Welch’s hands the tune takes on a sinister, roiling edge in keeping with the show’s midnight black undercurrent.
The teen footballers are happy to have her, though, with the Yellowjackets account responding, “We make one hell of a team.” The choice of the No Doubt ditty from the group’s breakthrough third album, Tragic Kingdom, is fitting given the song choices in the first season, which leaned into an angsty mid-1990s alt rock playlist as the soundtrack to the increasingly desperate vibe among the teens starving in the woods.
Among the songs sprinkled throughout the first season were tracks by Alanis Morissette (“Uninvited”), Smashing Pumpkins (“Today”), Hole (“Miss World”), Ultravox (“Vienna”), Montell Jordan (“This Is How We Do It”), Prodigy (“Firestarter”) and Mazzy Star (“Fade Into You”). The show’s packed cast for round two includes the adult versions of the players, Christina Ricci, Lynskey, Tawny Cypress and Juliette Lewis, as well as detective Elijah Wood, Lauren Ambrose, Simone Kessell, Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Thatcher, Samantha Hanratty, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson and more.
Season two premieres on Showtime on March 24 on streaming and on demand for subscribers and on linear outlets on March 26 at 9 p.m. ET.
Listen to the preview of Welch’s “Just a Girl” below.
Gil Kaufman
Billboard
