Griff is flying high: “People listen to me for honest stories and interesting pop music”

Just off tour with Taylor Swift, upcoming dates with Sabrina Carpenter, and her long-awaited debut finally out in the world – Griff is having a banner year.

Words: Ali Shutler.

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“There’s this feeling that my debut album needs to be really great,” Griff told Dork last year, a few days before she released what would become the title-track. Good news: ‘Vertigo’ is even better than ‘really great’.

But it’s easy to see why she was feeling the pressure. After releasing a string of singles, Griff became a comforting voice during lockdown with her emotionally-driven pop ballads before she won the BRIT Rising Star Award in 2021. Her performance at the ceremony was her second-ever live gig, as she shared a stage with the likes of Elton John, Olivia Rodrigo and The Weeknd. A summer of festival main stages followed, as ‘Black Hole’ became a viral smash while debut mixtape ‘One Foot In Front Of The Other’ crashed into the top five of the UK Albums Chart. A handful of remixes and collabs followed, but Griff spent a majority of the next two years opening shows for massive artists. Her first proper tour was a three-month run supporting Dua Lipa on her Future Nostalgia arena tour before she took to stadiums with Ed Sheeran and Coldplay. All the while, no new music was being released. “I guess my career has been pretty upside down so far,” says Griff. “Every single step has felt like being thrown into the deep end in the most amazing way.”

“However, I definitely felt the pressure, and I don’t think I responded to it very well,” Griff admits. “I’m my own worst critic and make things ten times worse by overthinking everything,” she says, but she also felt a mounting expectation to make another ‘Black Hole’.

“There were so many moments where we could have gone and chased that tail, but I knew it wouldn’t be a fruitful process for me,” Griff continues, having always prioritised new and interesting over safe and comfortable. “It would have been so easy for my team or whoever to tell me what my debut album needed to be, but I had to find my own gut in all of it,” she adds.

“I definitely felt the pressure, and I don’t think I responded to it very well”

Griff

Griff’s long-awaited debut album ‘Vertigo’ is everything you could want from the rising star, and more. There are euphoric, dance-infused pop bangers and moments of stripped-down heartbreak. It’s gorgeous and uplifting but isn’t afraid of twisting the knife or delivering a smirking lyric with a wink either. “It was really daunting going into it because there’s no manual for making a debut album,” she explains. “You really do just have to make it up as you go along.”

Taking things into her own hands, the entire album was written in scrappy little bursts between massive tours, with Griff avoiding professional recording studios to write in random Airbnbs. “It was the first time I had to write for something that I knew would be released, and there was an expectation that came with that. The idea of stepping into a studio felt like too much,” she says, especially with her label paying for each and every hour of studio time. “I know that people listen to me for honest stories and interesting pop music. I didn’t want to fall short of that just because there was this ticking clock.”

This casual approach to trick herself into writing an album meant that Griff had soon amassed a Dropbox folder with close to 100 songs in it. “There’s nothing like producing a song you’ve written to make you bored of it so it really boiled down to what still moved me,” she explains of how she picked the 14 that would become ‘Vertigo’. “There’s so much fucking good pop music this year,” she continues, namedropping Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter. “Pop is really inspiring right now, and I wanted to make sure my album had stories that felt as new and fresh.”

During the process of making the record, Griff was listening to “really strong, beautiful female artists” like Enya, Whitney Houston and Cyndi Lauper but was also taking influence from classic hip-hop and British synth-pop. “I wasn’t trying to find one specific sonic for the album because I know the storytelling is my thing, and I didn’t want to box myself in. I just wanted every song to be the best it could be,” she explains, with ‘Vertigo’ more a flex of what Griff is capable of than a definitive statement. 

Griff has released the album in three distinct chapters. The four tracks that made up ‘Vert1go Vol. 1’ were darker and moodier than anything she’d released before, while ‘Ver2igo Vol 2’ was far more euphoric. The full release of ‘Vertigo’ adds a sense of resolution to the coming-of-age whirlwind. “I felt like there was a real journey to the album and such a big spectrum of emotion, that I almost wanted to walk people through that,” says Griff. “Plus, I’m not sure I could deal with just releasing two singles before dropping the album, so why not do it this way?”

“It’s obviously a very painful record that sees me reflecting on different shifts in relationships and where I’m at within that,” Griff explains. “The beauty of pop is you can have a ballad and you can have a song like ‘Cycles’ on the same album, but they’re all emotionally tied into that ‘Vertigo’ umbrella of heartache and confusion and figuring it out,” she adds.

The entire thing ends with the haunting, dreamy confrontation of ‘Where Did You Go?’ because it forces a brief moment of peace after the emotional whirlwind that is ‘Vertigo’. “It’s also the underlying question of the entire record,” Griff offers. Tracks like ‘Miss Me Too’ are self-reflective, ’19th Hour’ and the title-track deal with romantic heartbreak, while ‘Everlasting’ is more about loss and family. “The whole album is about this painful state of the heart, and ‘Where Did You Go?’ sums that up.”

“In the midst of all the head fuckery, all I know is that I like writing music, and I’m good at it”

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Now that the record is done, Griff can listen to it and feel a sense of catharsis. “At the time, though, I just felt really lost and confused about everything,” she says, with that dizzying uncertainty reflected in the lyrics and giving every track an inescapable sense of honesty. “Now, it’s just nice to know that I got all that off my chest,” she says, more confident and self-assured for coming out the other side. 

What makes Griff’s journey more chaotic is the fact she never set out to be a pop star. She started making beats after school because it was fun and used songwriting to process the loneliness that came from being mixed-race in a predominantly white suburb of London. “I really didn’t overthink where it was going,” she says. At first she thought she could be a songwriter, partly because she looked up to people like Sia and Julia Michaels but also because she couldn’t see a clear way for her to actually become a main character pop star. “There really wasn’t much in the way of representation for someone who looks like me, or has my upbringing,” she says.

Then she signed a record deal while she was still in 6th Form and thought she’d make left-leaning pop that had occupied its own unique little corner of the world. “Then the BRITS happened, and suddenly my music had all this commercial potential,” she says. “All my expectations for music had been exceeded, but I was left asking what people actually wanted from me.” It’s why creating a debut album has taken a while, but that time has allowed Griff to reconnect to why she started releasing music in the first place. “I just want to write really good songs that soundtrack those important moments of people’s lives.”

“There are a lot of big feelings on ‘Vertigo’, and I hope it moves people,” Griff continues. However, she’s not spent much time thinking about why tracks like ‘Walk’, ‘Black Hole’ or ‘One Night’ have connected with so many. “It’s only very recently that it’s felt like people are actually listening to my music,” she offers. During COVID, she felt entirely removed from the artist/audience relationship while years on support tours only added to the fear that no one was actually listening. “It’s beyond your wildest dreams to be sharing a stage with Coldplay or Ed but you’re also so aware there are 80,000 people not there for you.” Since completing the album, Griff has been out on sold-out UK and European headline runs. “Now it feels like there are actual faces to put to the numbers.”

Those support tours also helped Griff rediscover the fun of music. “It’s such an unserious job, warming up the audience. You end up cutting away everything but the bangers, because people just want to dance. Music doesn’t always have to be so serious,” she adds, and even when it is, a little humour goes a long way. “I’ve sprinkled playful lyrics across the record,” she grins, describing ‘Astronaut’ as heart-wrenching, but the tongue-in-cheek line, “You said that you needed space, go on then, astronaut”, as silly. It’s the same with ‘Vertigo’ and “Couldn’t take the heat, that’s Mexico”. “It doesn’t really make sense, but I wanted to lean into that sense of fun a bit more,” says Griff.

“There are obviously some real low moments on it, but generally, it’s an album about dancing through emotional vertigo and feeling the euphoria, the desperation and the catharsis of heartache,” she offers. It feels like an important energy to be putting into the world. “I think people want to hear a sense of fun underneath everything. That’s why we’re seeing Sabrina and Chappell absolutely kill it, because people want to feel like they’re buying into something that’s real and authentic, but there’s also this level of optimism to it.”

After flexing her pop might by supporting Taylor Swift at Wembley last month (“I was nervous, but if anyone’s got the CV to not mess it up…”), Griff is due to spend rest of the year on the road, playing her own headline shows and supporting Sabrina on her Short n Sweet tour. “I want everyone to leave a Griff show feeling like they haven’t held anything back,” she offers. “It’ll be emotional but a lot of fun,” which is extremely ‘Vertigo’.

“There’s definitely still a part of me that’s like ‘ahh’ in the sense that it’s a week before I put out my first album, and I still have no idea how it’s going to go, but I feel at peace with the things that I can control,” she adds, surprisingly calm considering the release date has just moved forward a week. “In the midst of all the head fuckery, all I know is that I like writing music, and I’m good at it. That’s all I can really count on to guide me through the hectic journey of being a pop artist.” ■

Taken from the August 2024 issue of Dork. Griff’s album ‘Vertigo’ is out now.