Vertigo

Griff with her 14 track debut album Vertigo. The physical versions of the album include an exclusive live version of ‘So Fast’, recorded at her sold-out Earth Hackney show last year. Before Griff’s debut album had a name – or its titular 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. It’s a journey of self-discovery that Griff has taken fans on ever since, building the three volumes of her landmark project in real-time and weaving songs that resonated with the vertigo arc into work that moves through melancholy and heartache into healing and joy. A coming-of-age album shaped for complex times, Vertigo witnesses Griff scaling new creative heights without compromising the hand-stitched, home-made magic that first marked her out as British Pop’s most modern, exciting voice. With a 360-approach on everything from production, fashion and design to the spiral motif long connecting vertigo in plain sight – right down to her signature hair style – Griff’s debut album turns the tumultuousness of young adulthood into a source of power. Latest single ‘Miss Me Too’ is a euphoric, existential banger about the little- discussed irony of losing confidence as you supposedly grow older and wiser, and was accompanied by a beautifully choreographed video physically exorcizing such emotions. Throughout the record, the Brits Rising Star winner draws on her sideways origin-story, from her unorthodox Chinese-Jamaican outsider-status growing up to launching an international music career from the confines of her bedroom. That tenacious, no-nonsense talent always wise beyond her years also sounds – crucially – like she is living: free of expectation, and moving through a world in which there is no one way to make your debut album or to be yourself. Introducing the record, Griff comments: “the album is about vertigo as an emotion and the dizziness and upside down feeling of heartache. I wanted to drop this project in parts from insular low feelings (Vol.1) to desperate euphoria (Vol.2) and with volume three, the full story.”