Griff

About

Before Griff’s debut album had a name - or its first single, even - it had a feeling: Vertigo. That pit-of-your-stomach, up-is-down sense that the world is spinning faster than you can keep up with, and your own place in it has never felt less secure. In hindsight, Griff is an artist for whom the road regularly travelled was perhaps never an option - from her unorthodox, small-town Chinese-Jamaican upbringing to breaking through whilst trapped in her bedroom during a global pandemic. Yet being different has long been Griff’s superpower, and on her stunning new record you sense a young woman taking charge of that power. Vertigo, then, is a debut album with a difference: here is a dynamic, three-volume story that sees the 22-year-old multi-hyphenate misfit build her first full project in real-time, and in her own unmistakable way. A coming-of-age album shaped for complex times, Vertigo scales new creative heights for Griff without compromising the hand-stitched, home-made magic that marks her out as British Pop’s most modern, exciting voice. As the chapters of music culminating in the album move through melancholy and heartache into healing and joy, Griff takes the listener - and herself - on a journey of self-discovery: from the disorientation of young adulthood to losing the fearlessness of youth, and gaining the wisdom that maybe only a little bit of collateral Vertigo can bring. “You’re scared of love? Well aren’t we all.” Griff’s debut album started life in the summer of 2022. The performer, producer, designer and all-round prodigy had just spent a whirlwind of months on the road opening for Dua Lipa, playing her anthemic early material to thousands a night. For the first time, she wasn’t able to regularly retreat to the solace of songwriting as she’d first done as an 11-year-old Sarah Griffiths looking for her place in the bucolic village of Kings Langley. “It was the longest period I’d gone without writing, and that was strange for me. Writing has always been m

Artists

• Griff
• Stephen Dawes

Sources

• aeg · aeg-events-json v1