FEATURE:
Spotlight
Grace Davies
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LAST year…
was a big one for Grace Davies. She released her debut album, The Wrong Side of 25, and a string of amazing singles, including MDE, and Super Love Me. This is an amazing British artist from Blackburn, Lancashire. It is a part of the world I have perhaps not highlighted on my site before. There is still this massive focus on London, so anyone who hails from beyond the capital is especially interesting to me. Even if Grace Davies has been in music for a little while, her debut album did put her under the spotlight. Now, as we are in a new year, this incredible artist is primed to have a massive year. There are a few great interviews I want to come to, published around the release of The Wrong Side of 25. It is a spellbinding album from a remarkable songwriter. Ones to Watch sat down and spent some time with the supremely talented Grace Davies:
“For Grace, a supremely talented singer from Blackurn, UK struggling through the whirlpool of writing sessions, gigs and meetings in London, turning 25 almost made her quit. This album, titled after that before and after moment, is a recklessly vulnerable work of beauty, a testament to just how much work and perseverance is necessarily to survive in this industry. Its toils, when filtered through emotional and melodic expression, merit wondrous attention. We sat down with this fiery and fun singer for a deep dive on the album, good curry in London, and which is the wrong side of 25:
OnesToWatch: I believe being an artist is one of the most difficult jobs on earth. So, why are you an artist?
Grace Davies: It's a really good question, and I think there must be some sort of weird psychological thing going on to put yourself under that much stress and pressure every single day. There must be something wrong with me. But it's the only thing that I know how to do with all of my being, if that makes sense. It's the only thing that I've never trained for that feels correct in my life and that I learned to do without even learning to do it. And I just love music, I've been surrounded by performance since I was three. As someone who isn't a big talker, the thought of therapy and diaries is weird. But, being a songwriter is my vessel for that sort of stuff. So, without sounding cringey, I think being an artist is very much in my DNA.
If your musical abilities were taken away from you, what could you imagine yourself doing right now?
Interior design.
Very specific.
I love George Clark and his architectural programs. And, you know, I can appreciate a good sofa and a good wallpaper, you know? That's my other love. Either that or I would get super, super nerdy and work in Formula One in some sort of capacity.
Well, let’s get to the album, because it is kind of impressive. So, Grace, the hard-hitting question is, which side of 25 is the wrong side?
We'll leave it to imagination about which side I’m on… I came up with the title on my 26th birthday and it was something that I said to my mum when she was like, “Oh, you're closer to 30 than you are 20,” and I was like, yeah, “Wrong side of 25.” I think it just stemmed from me having this sinking feeling that I'm not quite where I need to be in my mid 20s. There's a lot of things that happen when you're 25. You hit this level of “adulting,” where everyone seems to be getting their shit together, particularly from where I'm from. A lot of my friends were either buying houses with their partners or getting engaged or getting pregnant. And meanwhile I can barely afford to pay my rent in London because I'm paying for an album. So it's that panic, where your collagen decreases, you're in the “overs” category on the X factor and you're suddenly with Wagner. The industry also says that when you’re past 25, you’re too old to be a pop star. That’s what the album’s about, really. It’s my fear of time moving forward. There’s a song on there called “The Youngest I’ll Ever Be.” You know, you watch movies about people going back in time and changing things, like one of my favorite films, About Time, where he gets in a wardrobe, goes back in time, and reverses things he’s done. Everyone questions whether they could’ve done things differently, or better, but you can’t. I hate that. So the album is about time, and existential crises about being on the wrong side of 25, as some would say, aka me.
Well, if you’re on the wrong side, I’m way past it. I remember when I was younger, we were having this weird conversation about ageism and life endurance and purpose. There was an old movie called Logan's Run, where society valued youth so much that you ascended into your death at age 30. Sometimes it feels like that, in these industries.
It does feel like that. But now, it's been three years since I came up with this album, and I do feel a bit better now. So, there is hope.
There is hope. The concept of “aging out of being a pop star” is interesting, 1) because it’s so often gendered and misogynistic toward growing women, and 2) because it presents a looming failure in front of budding artists who are just starting to reach musical maturity. Were you wrestling with any inner turmoil about powering through these roadblocks and choosing this as a career? How did you keep up the strength to persevere?
I think I hit such a rock bottom with it that I felt there was no way to go other than to just do a 180. At the end of my last EP, in 2022, I was done, I'd already had the conversations with my manager of like, I'm going to quit. This is it for me. I've tried doing the independent artist route, and just financially and mentally, it takes such a huge toll. Particularly when you're trying to put things out to the same standards of major labels, it's really, really challenging. So I felt quite drained by all of that. I was really done. Then, I got put in a writing session that I really, really didn't want to be in. I didn't know the person that I was working with, and I was just over it a little bit. And we ended up writing “A Wonderful, Boring Normal Life” that day, which is on the album. I wrote it with Paul, who I'd never met before and he co-produced the whole album with me. I feel like that day – I don't know what happened in that session, but it very much made me realise or remember what I loved about this job. So I said, “Okay, things can’t get worse than they have been, so we either quit or do a complete 180.” It really is such a gamble, so we decided to go all in”.
Actually, before continuing with interviews from last year, I want to take us back to 2022. That strange year where the pandemic was in full flight, it was a tough time for artists trying to break through. However, it is interesting to look back on that time now. I do want to drop an interview in from NOCTIS and, as they say, this unveiling of a Pop star. Someone who I think will get even bigger and popular as we head through this year:
“Two years after becoming an independent, Davies has since locked down a Top 40 single and sold out the prestigious St. Pancras Old Church for her first ever headline show. Without the backing of a label, she’s had the support of fans by her side through every inch of her journey.
‘It Wasn’t Perfect, But We Tried’ sets Davies up for her “big pop star moment”; big audacious choruses, sublime visuals and a bold sense of authenticity. Infused euphoria can be felt through each of its five tracks, of which some date back almost five years. Carefully polished, each song has taken on a new lease of life, now being the perfect moment for their debut.
Her story is more than just inspiring, it’s real. It hasn’t always been highs for Davies upon entering the industry, so now seeing her riding on waves of soaring success feels the utmost deserved. Speaking to Noctis Magazine about her journey so far, please welcome your new favourite pop star…
Hello Grace! You’ve had a whirlwind of a year, how have you been?
It’s been a wild, wild year! A very busy one and also a very tiring one, but also just very fulfilling to have this new EP out there and having something to show for a year of being stuck in producer mode, which was new to me but also very fun.
What has been the biggest change for you in this last year?
I was living at my parents house and I’ve now moved back to London. I lived in the city for four years and moved back during the pandemic, so that I could fund the “artist thing” independently. Because realistically, I couldn’t pay for that and rent at the same time.
It was a big thing for me being able to move back to London. But being here with all the people that I’m meant to be with every day, music wise, is really fun again”.
Your new project, ‘It Wasn’t Perfect, But We Tried’, is beautiful! This is your third EP in three years – how did making this EP differ from the rest?
I wanted to level it up in every kind of aspect of life, especially with the artwork and music videos. It’s such a small thing, but the visual aspect of a body of work really matters a lot. I’ve never really walked away from either of my EPs being like, “I love that artwork, I’m really happy with that CD and the pages and all the photos that are in it” and with this one I wanted that, I wanted to feel like a pop star.
I remember the photoshoot on that day, it was when I was wearing the “Wolves” artwork outfit, I said to my manager, “I feel like a pop star,” and throughout my whole nine years in the industry I’ve never felt like that before. Not that that should matter, but I just wanted to level up in that sense. I feel like I’ve stepped it up a little bit each time I’ve done an EP, or hope I have anyway. I just wanted it to be one big euphoric “I’m here” moment.
You helped produce each track on the EP – how was getting to grips with this?
I think because I have such a strong vision and I can hear things in my brain, it’s just about sitting there and flicking through sounds and going, “that’s what I can hear!” It’s difficult to get to grips with the new system, but then at the same time I think when you can hear something it just sort of happens. Toby Scott who I produced “Wolves”, “Breathe” and “Supervillain” with, we spent weeks just sitting in his studio in Brighton next to each other at the computer screen and that was such a brilliant process for me.
It was the same sort of thing that I did on the first EP, I went to Sweden and sat with the producer for a couple of weeks. But this time, I just felt way more involved. There’s a song called “Windows & Walls” on the EP which I must have re-recorded the vocal and piano like two or three times because I just couldn’t get it right.
I think producing something yourself is amazing because you get your name above the door, but there’s also this thing where you can’t step back and say it’s finished very easily when you’ve written it, sung it and produced it. You’re way too close to it all and that’s something I really struggled with this year, just knowing when things were right. I was relying on people around me to be like, “Yes, it’s fine! Step away from the computer!”
You started self-producing throughout lockdown, is it something you’re going to continue with?
Yeah, definitely. No one cares about my music as much as I do. I think I always put a massive amount of pressure on myself to make sure that it’s really good and really right. And you can’t always rely on other people to get it as good as you necessarily would. So yeah, I’ve just got to keep chipping away with it and learn more production stuff. Fun!”.
In July, CLASH spoke with Grace Davies as she released The Wrong Side of 25. It was a moment that she had been waiting for for so long. I do think that it is one of the best debut albums of last year. Davies is a stunning artist who is going to be in music for a very long time to come. I might be a bit late to get tickets, but she plays London’s Jazz Cafe on 5th February, so go and catch her if you can:
“Davies was motivated to start writing when she was 15, and keen to enter competitions for young local musicians in Blackburn and its surrounding areas that required artists to perform original material. In order to do this, aided by YouTube tutorials, she sat on her bedroom floor every night and taught herself piano. “For me, it was always more of a necessity than something I wanted to do. It wasn’t until further down the line that I realised I actually love songwriting. Now I see it as something I need for my own sanity. I see it as therapy, It’s like writing a diary entry.” She says.
“When I look through old school reports and speak to my mum about what she used to hear at parents’ evenings, all the teachers would be like ‘Grace is exceptional at creative writing’ and I always just kind of ignored that. And now that I’m a full time songwriter it’s like, well that makes sense doesn’t it?”
She goes on to break down the overarching theme of the record. “‘The Wrong Side Of 25’ is something I said to my mum on my 26th birthday. I’ve always had this weird panic about time. You know when you watch those films where they go back in time and change things. I always get really freaked out by that because I would love to do that, but I cannot, because that isn’t real!”
She expands, “It’s like how X factor has an ‘Over 25s’ category. Like, am I now suddenly grouped in with Wagner? Because realistically, that is a perfect example of how the music industry puts a shelf life on your artistry, by essentially implying that if you’re over 25, you’re too old to be a pop star. It’s mortifying to me that I’m now supposedly in that category, especially as someone who is considered an ‘up and coming artist.’”
Now 28, Davies admits that she no longer feels as existential as she did when she began working on the project. “I do think that the album that I’ve created now is head and shoulders above what I could have created seven years ago. It’s not even comparable to the songs I was writing back then.” She explains, “So in some weird and twisted way, me landing on making an album now is perfect, because I couldn’t imagine making better music for my first album. I love it so much.”
Breaking down the eighteen month process that led to the record’s inception, Davies tells CLASH “I wanted to bring in orchestras, I wanted to bring in live musicians and do things that I had never done before. Music has become this thing that people can make so easily on their laptops, and you can replicate sounds so easily, but you can’t replicate the magic of being in a room with musicians.” She continues, “Again, I thought, I’m gonna do this for me. If this is the first and last thing I ever do, it’s going to be exceptional.”
“I’ve been performing with jazz and swing bands since I was a teenager, so being in front of a 15-piece orchestra and having them play my music back to me was a priority. I saved all the pennies in the world to do that. We recorded live drums, live brass, and found a producer that completely got me and my sound, and didn’t have an ego that excluded me from the production,” she says.
For independent artists, touring and performing live is becoming an increasingly challenging landscape, especially in an ecosystem where grassroots venues are closing their doors for good at an alarming rate. On November 6th, Davies and her band will play their biggest headline show to date at The Jazz Cafe in Camden – a venue that in 2020 had to run a crowdfunding campaign to save it from permanent closure.
Speaking on this issue, Davies tells CLASH “These spaces are crucial. If we only support artists that can fill out Wembley, or only go to shows at the O2, a much bigger percentage of the music industry dies, compared to the fractional minority that can fill those arenas and stadiums. It’s so important that artists use those indie venues, but also that those venues and the public support us. It’s a symbiotic relationship”.
I am finishing with a wonderful and interesting interview with HUNGER. Although Grace Davies is a slightly new name to me, listening to The Wrong Side of 2025 and her work before, you can tell how good she is and how much she wants this. That music is her passion and she is going to make wonderful albums for years. A tremendous artist that we should be very proud of:
“What was the experience of co-producing the album like?
I loved it. I’ve never had more fun in my career than when I made this album, because I got to create music that didn’t necessarily fit radio moulds or would be a TikTok sound. It was just about making something really fun and experimenting. Paul (Whalley) has a wicked studio. He’s not the kind of producer who just works off a laptop — his space is filled with instruments of all shapes and kinds. That was a completely new experience for me. What’s great is that he understands I can produce, even though I have more of a producer’s head than an engineer’s hands. He’ll say, You just tell me what to do. Even if I’m not physically doing it myself, the idea came from my brain — so in that sense, I’m still producing it. He’ll say, I’m just your engineer for the day, which is refreshing, because a lot of producers have pretty big egos when it comes to that sort of thing.
Do you ever feel pressure to make ‘TikTokable’ music?
There is pressure. I think all artists feel it — it’s just a matter of whether you acknowledge it or not. In the past, especially when choosing singles, I’d always think, Oh, has this one got a lyric in it that could be a trend? And I just didn’t want to do that with this album. If something blows up on that app, then honestly, brilliant, because we know what a powerful tool it is, and, unfortunately, it is the only way a song can do well for an independent artist these days. You can have all of the Spotify billboards and the radio plays in the world, but it doesn’t move the needle anymore. So, [TikTok] is incredibly important, but I’ll never create something that feels inauthentic to me. It’s just not who I am. I have to be able to sleep at night, twenty years from now, knowing that I made an album that made me happy.
You have a beautiful song on your album, ‘Butterfly’. Can you tell us a bit about that?
It’s an emotional one. It’s one we’ve been performing live for about a year now at little acoustic shows and stuff, and it’s always the one that gets people. It’s been a real underdog in terms of the album because it’s so stripped back, so it’s been really nice to see the reaction to that. It’s a song that means a lot to me, and one that I debated writing for a long time because it didn’t feel like my story to tell. It’s about my grandparents, and I didn’t want to write something really sad about the fact that they had Alzheimer’s and dementia. I wanted to write something that felt like it honoured their memory and was a love song for them — one they would have sung to each other at the start of their relationship, and also at the end. It feels like a nice nod to that experience without being too traumatic.
If you could go back to 2022 when you nearly gave up music, what would you tell yourself?
I honestly would say the best is yet to come, even though we’re doing things on a smaller scale in terms of the number of listeners, or the fan bases that you once had on a show like X Factor compared to now. It’s been eight years, but the enjoyment I got out of making this record has been like nothing I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve never felt prouder of myself and my music.
Who are your biggest inspirations?
There are very obvious nods to the artists that I grew up on in this album such as ELO, ABBA, Robbie Williams, Roxy Music and Earth, Wind and Fire. There are numerous references to the ’70s and ’80s. I’m very lucky to have had parents who had excellent music taste, particularly my dad, so I just wanted to make an album that felt like those artists who made me who I am. They made me so in love with music, and they made me want to pursue music, and if I really think what my younger self would want to do, it would be to make music like that. And that’s what I’ve done”.
Following perhaps the biggest year of her career so far, this year will see her capitalising on the release of her debut album. I guess there will be new singles and some big tour dates. Maybe a few festivals. I have seen various sites tip Grace Davies for success this year. It is an important time for the Blackburn artist. Her fanbase is growing and there is a lot of attention coming her way. Music that instantly moves you and lodges in your brain, this is a unique and spectacular artist…
TO behold.
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