ROSE GRAY

Rose Gray - Louder, Please

Rose Gray knows that one perfect night at the club can make you feel reborn. Louder, Please, the long-awaited debut album from the London-based singer, songwriter and DJ bottles up the feeling of that one perfect night – the new faces and the new loves, the invigorating new sounds and the tears that look like glitter under dancefloor lights. Comprised of euphoric electronic pop and spine-tingling maximalist club music, Louder, Please announces Gray as a masterful chronicler of life’s ecstatic highs and soul-crushing lows, finding heartfelt experimental pop in the areas between. Inspired by icons she loves like Robyn, Kylie Minogue and Madonna circa Ray of Light, Gray’s storytelling and lyricism locate everyday truth in big-room anthems.

From its opening notes to its titular demand, Louder, Please is literally a statement of intent. Largely written alongside legendary pop songwriter Justin Tranter (Lady Gaga, Chappell Roan, Selena Gomez) who recently signed Gray to their publishing house Facet, the record features collaborations with Sega Bodega, Pat Alvarez, Sur Back, Uffie and Alex Metric, among others. Throughout, it recalls the carefree highs of 90s and 2000s dance music, anchored by Gray’s sultry voice, which delivers lines that feel like timeworn affirmations. As she sings on the thrilling, anthemic first single ‘Free’: “The good shit in life is always free.”

Born in Walthamstow, East London – on New Year’s Eve, an auspicious date for a future club doyenne – Rose Gray has been a musician her whole life: she’s always sung, whether at home listening to pop songs on the radio or in school choirs. Rose originally had her eyes trained on a career in athletics – she was a competitive athlete and long-distance runner when she was younger – until a serious ankle injury forced her to spend months at home rethinking her sporting career. Put on bedrest, Rose Gray turned her attention to her other love, and started writing songs on her Casio piano at home.

From there, it was clear that music was her true love: she pursued classical vocal training, and briefly attended a renowned performing arts high school. Within three weeks of college, she had auditioned and begun working with a record label and dropped out to better pursue her dreams of being a pop star. As it is for so many people, Gray’s first experience working in the pop industry was a harsh wake-up call: she cut 100 songs as a teenager before realising she was moving in the wrong direction and parted ways with the label, unable to take her songs with her. Soon enough, Gray was 19, with no higher education and no direction. So she did what any self-respecting, directionless young adult does: she found the club. Left cold by her experiences in the industry thus far, Rose found herself doing odd jobs – working the door at Fabric, roleplaying illnesses with medical students, teaching singing – all while immersing herself in London’s rich electronic music culture. You can hear those years, spent living for nights out and forging a new sense of self under club nights, deep within Louder, Please; this is Gray’s ode to the transformative, life-changing nature of a good party.

Around five years ago, emerging from her “early life crisis”, Gray started to feel a desire, once again, to channel her experiences into music. After releasing a few songs that she felt didn’t capture her true spirit – and desire to release music that could make you dance and cry, maybe at the same time – she began to retool her sound, using pandemic lockdowns to tap into the rave and dance culture that had shaped her. 2020 singles ‘Same Cloud’ and ‘Save Your Tears’ announced a kind of rebirth of the Rose Gray project, capturing the wit and carefree spirit that she so wanted to convey in her music. The songs connected immediately, with Clara Amfo naming ‘Save Your Tears’ her BBC Radio 1 Tune of the Week and NME naming Gray an artist to watch. Her debut mixtape, 2021’s Dancing, Drinking, Talking, Thinking, saw acclaim from DIY and The Line of Best Fit, and led to Gray’s signing to acclaimed indie label Play It Again Sam. Her two subsequent EPs, Synchronicity and Higher Than The Sun, built on Gray’s renown as a rising dance-pop sensation and attracted attention from The FACE, The FADER, The Guardian, Billboard and more.

While working on her own music, Rose Gray built a career as an in-demand songwriter and collaborator, honing her skills in the pop industry; in the past few years, she’s released hits with renowned Bristolian producer Clipz, aka Redlight (‘The Touch’), superstar French DJ Kungs (‘Afraid of Nothing’), and recent TSHA collaboration ‘Girls (riffing on ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’). Gray is also a close collaborator of rising pop superstar Shygirl, supporting her at Printworks last year and returning to Fabric, where she once took coats, to support her hyped Club Shy night. Gray’s track ‘Promise Me’ also appears on Shygirl’s Fabric mixtape. In what might be the single most coveted pop co-sign, Gray has also been collaborating with the Spice Girls’ Mel C on new music, and performed at her 50th birthday party at London’s Koko.

All of those releases and co-writes were building to Louder, Please: a bildungsroman set to a 4/4 beat, finding Gray singing about finding friends and losing lovers, exploring new places and new bodies, with a boundless sense of fun and empathy. After 10 years spent grinding and putting all her time into music, Gray found herself with an album that reflected her life as both a club kid and a storyteller in its entirety. “I’m complicated – some days, I feel like I know who I am, and I’m free, and other days, I’m quite confused,” she says. Traversing four-to-the-floor anthems, outre interludes and cinematic orchestration, Gray describes the record as a “rollercoaster journey”, tapping into Ibiza euphoria as well as songs like ‘Hackney Wick’, an industrial spoken-word track that captures the grit and unadorned glamour of clubbing in London. “Hedonism and escapism are a big part of the record, but there’s parts that are delicate, too. My personality, the colour of my hair, the way I dress, the way I act, there’s a lot going on – and the album reflects that.”

On ‘Switch’, Gray’s fears around losing touch with a long-distance partner turn into a bouncy, sexy deep-house cut; working with Tranter and producer Sam Homaee, her instructions to a partner (“Push and pull positions/Flipping our traditions/Baby, we can switch”) become the perfect metaphor for flexibility in a relationship. ‘Everything Changes (But I Won’t)’ channels similar relationship anxieties into a windswept electro-pop ballad that sees Gray pledge fealty to a partner who’s on another planet. It’s heartfelt and earnest but never sappy, Gray’s nostalgic lyrics never letting her lose sight of the beat. “I definitely wrote a lot of this record while I was going through a breakup – it was quite a tumultuous period in my life,” says Gray. “‘Everything Changes’, on the surface, is a love song, but it’s also kind of sad – it’s talking about someone I’ve been in love with for most of my adult life.”

Other songs are purely euphoric: ‘Party People’, a collab with renowned producer Sega Bodega, is an ode to the people you meet in the club smokers or the line for the bathroom – friendly, generous spirits who might just change your life. The slinky, hedonistic ‘Wet and Wild’, a song that feels like it was beamed straight in from Kylie’s Fever era, finds Gray blowing off steam over addictive, acid-house-tinged production, while first single ‘Free’ is a heady, hedonistic and impossible resist urge to live life at a higher frequency. Both heightened in sound and its sun-kissed visuals, ‘Free’ represents an album about digging into what truly matters (in the case of ‘Free’, those things which have no material cost). “‘Free’ is probably the brightest song on the record – when I wrote it, I instantly felt goosebumps,” she says. “I grew up loving Robyn, and I think it kind of exists in that space – it’s really emotive and anthemic. It’s hard for me to listen to that song without feeling good and smiling and wanting to go on holiday.”

On the pounding house-pop track ‘Angel of Satisfaction’, which captures the gothic thrills of early Lady Gaga, Gray combines her love for the cinematic with her floor-filling chops, creating an anthem for those late-night moments that feel haunted and thrilling in equal measure. “I had a dream of an angel coming to me and warning me about fame and fortune and the darkness of the world that I want to be part of,” she says. “It’s a bit tongue in cheek – like, the idea of whoring for the glory.” Despite its dark inspiration, ‘Angel of Satisfaction’ is pure pleasure: These songs feel modern in their

intent but totally classic in their sound, the kind of tracks that you used to wear out on your Ministry of Sound Annual CD as a kid.

On Louder, Please, Rose Gray reveals herself as a canny bridger between the worlds of club music and pop music, drawing on the campy and the totally sincere in equal measure in order to conjure the feeling of one of the greatest nights out ever, where every hour is golden hour and every new friend you meet feels like someone you’ve been waiting to run into. In its instructive title, Louder, Please is also the sound of Rose Gray powerfully - but with quintessential, British politeness - backing herself (who she is, what she wants, and the artist she’s always had the potential to become). Raw and melodic, hopeful and heartfelt, hearing Louder, Please feels like listening to someone’s life story – maybe yours.

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