A decade after it first launched as a podcast, No Chill Girl is back. The project, created by writer and broadcaster Dee Salmin, built a loyal following by tackling conversations about love, sex and dating with the kind of honesty that wasn’t common online at the time. It later led Salmin to host triple j’s The Hook Up for five years and, more recently, publish her debut book, It’s Not Love, Actually.
Now, No Chill Girl has returned as a Substack newsletter. Covering love, sex, dating and feminism, it’s Salmin’s move towards longer-form writing at a time when more creators are choosing newsletters over algorithm-driven social platforms than ever.
Speaking at the launch in Melbourne, Salmin said she’d found herself gravitating towards Substack as a reader, drawn to more thoughtful writing amid an online landscape increasingly saturated with AI-generated and attention-grabbing content. It made sense, then, that her own work followed suit.
“Culturally there’s been a real thirst for nuance and deeper conversations and bigger articles than just the AI slop that we’re getting at the moment on socials,” she said.
The newsletter will deliver everything we loved about the podcast, only on a brand new platform, publishing several recurring columns each week, alongside recommendations and more personal essays (aptly titled ‘Dee’s Diary’) that sit behind the paywall.
“Sometimes I get a bit of trolling, and things that I say get warped and taken out of context,” Salmin said. “A huge part of my job is being able to share vulnerable, honest stuff… those things still happen in my life, and I want to be able to share them. This will be a safe place to do that.”
To celebrate No Chill Girl’s newest iteration, Salmin hosted an intimate celebration at Melbourne’s MANE, launched alongside Substack’s own Annabelle Russell.
She sent RUSSH postcards from the night that was, below.
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