WITH A FIRE NEW EP, IT'S TIME TO GET TO KNOW GRIFF
18-year-old rising UK singer Griff has come through with her first EP Mirror Talk!
Previously released singles Mirror Talk and Didn't Break It Enough scored deep public approval. Now Griff's shared the full five-track EP and it does not disappoint.
There is something in the music of Griff that speaks of a wisdom far beyond her years. Thematically Mirror Talk largely addresses her generation’s anxious relationship with self-perception, set against a spinetingling spider’s web of beats, yet it's devoid of neuroses. She's come through the other side of her teens as one tough cookie with some pearler advice for new fans going through similar experiences.
Griff is a one-woman production, song-writing and performing powerhouse, set to unleash her full future-pop powers and own 2020. Stream Mirror Talk and get to know the rising star better below!
She runs her own show
On the one hand, Griff is your textbook good girl next door. She’s just out of school, an 18-year-old straight-A student. On quite the other, on account of the mastery, she’s shown so far in taking complete control of her career, there is a touch of the young unicorn about her.
Speaking on the treatment for the video for Didn’t Break It Enough, the captivating electronic slow-jam which cuts straight to the core of semi-masochistic young heartbreak, Griff realised she stood out from the crowd due to her overarching vision. Used to exerting complete control of her music (“I didn’t realise how rare it was for women to produce their own stuff until people started telling me”), why couldn’t she do it with the styling too? For GRIFF, a beautiful, striking young woman with Chinese/Jamaican heritage and the most fabulous, signature, outsized bubble pony-tail, the visuals count just as much as the music.
“I said to everyone, it’s one outfit, do we really need a stylist?” she recalls. “It’s going to cost us how much? I may as well just go to Dover Street Market and buy myself a dress with the money.” GRIFF’s big fashion awakening were the romantic dresses of Molly Goddard “Before Villenelle,” she notes. “But I always just find designers inspiring. I’m used to making clothes out of nothing. My favourite shopping is thrift.” In the event, she didn’t even need to shop for herself, taking to her sewing machine and creating a whole look in one week. “I thought I’d buy some stuff in case everyone at the label thought what we’d made was a bit shit. I brought it all out and everyone loved it.”
She grew up on Taylor Swift
The first album she loved and bought was Taylor Swift’s Fearless, which she dutifully learned to play, back to front.
“There was such a simplicity to the melodies and chords, you could do it very young.” Would she still be able to do it now? “Every. Single. Word.”
Looking back, there was something more to the appeal of Taylor than her basic boy/girl, in and out of love stories that appealed to the little Griff. <
“I had the most horrendous growth spurt in primary school, I was HUGE. I looked different from everybody else anyway. I think I must’ve looked at life for a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl with a ponytail and thought it looked so easy.”
Griff's debut single Mirror Talk explored her thoughts around body image and confidence.
Her family looked after foster children
It didn’t take long for Griff to begin embracing her difference, in music and in life. A rotating cast-list of foster children passed through the Griffiths household, where she still lives, probably fifteen in total.
“It teaches you something about selfless love,” she says of having so many foster siblings. “The first is and always was going to be the hardest to say goodbye to when they went to be adopted.” She was eight years old. “And I was the only girl, and the youngest. You learn not to be the focus of attention, really quickly.”
Griff is self-taught
Griff’s production and song-writing skills were honed at home, utilising her brother’s computer software and the family piano after school.
“It came naturally,” she says. “But writing music, actually, is kind of a ridiculous thing. Every day you’re expected to reinvent eight notes and marry them to a new concept.”
She found her well was deep for conjuring new worlds in song and soon attracted the attention of a family friend who began encouraging to her seek contacts in the industry. Her only worry, on signing a deal just prior to heading into the big bad world from school was that something so beloved, such a safe space for her, would now be swallowed by the machine. “My biggest fear was that music was a hobby before and it was so exciting to do, especially when school was awful. It was such a relief to go home and write. My fear was that it suddenly wouldn’t be a hobby anymore. Would the ideas still be there.”
The ideas were certainly there. Check out the video for her latest single Paradise below.
As her debut EP merrily attests, there is so much more to come from Griff.
“When you are doing it, you realise how much there is to say about the world and to say about yourself,” she notes. “I feel so much bigger when I am on stage.” With creation comes new ambitions. “I don’t want to be an artist who’s around for five minutes and people forget about,” she says. “I want my music to be remembered in ten, fifteen years to come.”
Griff is making music to be played forever.