“It definitely doesn’t feel like I’m a pop star,” says Griff, gracefully sidestepping NME’s suggestion that the 23-year-old very much is one. “The way I’ve come up and started in music feels very upside down.”
It would only take a quick glance at Griff’s (real name Sarah Griffiths) calendar for the past 12 months to see that, despite her modesty, the songwriter and producer has more than enough credentials to comfortably assume such a coveted job title. 2023 alone included supporting Coldplay on a European stadium tour and a glowing co-sign from Taylor Swift who implored her 271 million Instagram followers to stream Griff’s towering 2023 single ‘Vertigo’.
The year prior, she was opening shows for Florence And The Machine, Ed Sheeran and Dua Lipa, along with performing at her first Glastonbury and storming the main stage at Reading & Leeds. And that all came after she won the BRITs Rising Star Award in 2021 – the occasion that also marked only her second-ever live performance, thanks to the pandemic lockdowns – and released her massive Top 20 chart song ‘Black Hole’. “I’m just trying to do my best to keep up with all the opportunities,” she says today, humbly.
It’s no wonder, then, that the whole “pop star” thing has been a bit dizzying for Griff. After all, the milestones that many artists will have checked off before reaching such career highlights are nowhere to be seen. She hasn’t released a debut album, or even been on a proper European headline tour of her own yet – though that’s about to change in the coming months.
“You usually start off doing very intimate gigs and then work your way up around the scene. And then, suddenly, I was in these big stadiums and arenas,” she says. “It’s such a weird industry on so many levels, that imposter syndrome follows you everywhere. No one gives you a manual as to how to be an artist.”
When NME meets Griff on an overcast February afternoon in the attic of an east London studio, we catch her in a rare moment of stillness. Poised on a cream white swivel armchair as she unwinds from her Cover shoot, Griff’s statement locks – styled fashionably over the years in her signature bubble ponytail or long, swishy plaits to complement her own handmade outfits – are chucked up into a messy bun. The roar of the nearby London City Airport departures overhead occasionally disturbs the zen of the bright open space, overpowering a softly spoken, very jet-lagged Griff, who’s just returned from a busy run of shows in Australia, Asia and the US.
The live stint followed shortly after she returned with her December EP, ‘vert1go vol.1’, marking the first instalment in a series of EPs that form part of a bigger, but still rather secretive collection, with the next set to drop some time this year. “I imagine it all coming together eventually at some point,” she says. “But I’m kind of doing a jigsaw now.”
The first four-track project featured some of Griff’s most powerful vocals yet. Her expansive and impeccably polished anthems on heartache and navigating the “emotional bootcamp” of your 20s brought the singer’s balladry to new heights, allowing Griff to expel the feelings that had been pushed down the priority list while she was busy touring the world. The result is a magnified, full-bodied sound that has progressed in step with Griff’s own growth as a musician and producer. It’s why it only made sense to name the first volume after her track ‘Vertigo’, a word which captures the sensation of her vertiginous rise. “I’ve been seeing [the word] in an emotional sense,” she says. “The idea that the world is spinning faster than what you can keep up with, and this feeling of being unbalanced and a bit upside down.”
“The way I’ve come up in music feels very upside down”
But that’s also why Griff has allowed herself the space to be more intentional with new music. Her first project, 2019’s ‘The Mirror Talk’ EP, was written while she was still at school. 2021 mixtape, ‘One Foot In Front Of The Other’, was penned during the COVID-19 lockdown, followed by her NME award-winning Sigrid collab ‘Head On Fire’. Then, most of 2022 and 2023 was spent managing the “highs and lows” of touring life. She’s now enjoying the prospect of releasing music in a “low pressure” way for the sake of “my own sanity”, treating fans to regular drops while she can curiously watch her creations find their place in the world.
The first introduction to Volume Two, which Griff promises will “turn up the energy”, is the soaring ‘Miss Me Too’, a sonic quest back to her authentic self. “I love writing super sad songs, and I love writing big pop songs,” she says. ‘Miss Me Too’ is somewhere in between – a euphoric sad banger which sends Griff’s voice to the stars, sharing the propulsive intensity of artists like MUNA and Tove Lo.
“It’s about going, ‘Woah, there was a version of me that used to exist that didn’t feel this heavy or low or heartbroken’. It’s about desperately searching for that version of yourself,” she says. Has she had any luck finding it? “I think I’m still finding it, to be honest. I think that’s the turmoil of it all, is that you constantly feel like you’re searching for it.”
Griff may have always known that she wanted to pursue music, but she kept her ambitions close to her chest growing up. She was raised in Kings Langley, Hertfordshire with her two older brothers and more than 20 foster siblings over the years, making for a “very busy household”.
While soul, gospel and R&B artists like Stevie Wonder and Mary J Blige filled their home growing up, music was viewed more as a hobby than a viable career path. “Having a Chinese mum and Jamaican dad, creative jobs are not particularly at the forefront,” she says. “You feel like you owe it to [them] and to yourself to get a good education.” But she honed her musical talents behind closed doors, writing her own songs from around age 13 and teaching herself production on her brother’s Logic Pro software, before uploading her tracks to SoundCloud.
“These are some of my best songs. The sound is getting bigger”
Meanwhile, she gained experience singing in local church services which proved to be valuable networks to meet well-connected musicians, before she eventually signed a deal with Warner Records while still in sixth form. After years spent refining her triple-threat offerings as a singer, writer and producer, Griff’s large-scale, expressive pop immediately resonated. Whether you listen to a song like ‘Black Hole’, the punchy ‘Walk’ or more stripped-back moments like ‘Good Stuff’, her ambitious template arranges powerful visual motifs with universal emotions and playful pop lyrics like, “You’re scared of heights, that’s vertigo” and “You said that you needed space, go on then, astronaut”.
It’s a formula that’s earned Griff a whirlwind of success so far, but one that’s understandably required more time than the typical commercial approach usually allows. Instead, she pumped the brakes and deliberately carved out space to allow herself to not only exercise those skills, but expand upon them. The next EP cranks up the dials to reveal a fully-realised evolution of Griff’s sound that’s totally aligned with her purposeful approach. “It feels like some of my best songs,” she says. “Sonically, the sound is getting bigger and more competent.”
The four new tracks were written in Airbnbs around the English countryside – selected out of a bank of around 100 songs – and carry an overarching theme of loss, underpinned by a more uplifting sound. She reels off the remaining tracklist: a song called ‘Cycles’ produced by one of her “favourites” Mura Masa; ‘Pillow In My Arms’, about the nighttime comforter that has “heard your cries and your worries”; and ‘Hole In My Pocket’, about “losing things at a really rapid rate”.
Griff is not only meticulous in her songwriting, but she is forensically attentive to every single detail in her music. Finding herself in a unique space between the DIY bedroom genre and squeaky clean studio pop, her autonomous approach means that the authenticity of each hand-finished detail makes for a wholly credible listening experience. “I do think I’m very in the detail of everything, maybe to my own detriment,” she admits.
But it does mean that she’s learned to hold her own in an industry that is still dominated by male producers. “I don’t think it’s getting better quick enough,” she says. Indeed, while last year showed signs of improvement, women still only made up 6.5 per cent of producers on the Billboard Hot 100. “It’s definitely felt like I’ve had to wrestle for an album that doesn’t have a million and one producers on the credits.” She adds: “Even producers respecting me, as a producer, is a funny thing to navigate.”
But Griff has earned more than enough support from the industry’s biggest players to know that she’s impressing the right people. She counts Coldplay frontman Chris Martin among tourmates and musical collaborators, after he gifted his moving piano interpretation for her song ‘Astronaut’. While on the road with the band, Martin advised that she strip the track right back from its “synthy and dark” origins. “He’s so naturally talented, by ear he played it the first time perfectly,” Griff recalls. By that same evening, he’d already picked up the melody and mapped out his rendition. They got in the studio and laid down the track in one take.
She’s also found something of a genuine fangirl in pop icon Swift, who not only tweeted that she was a “huge fan” of the singer back in 2020 and shouted her out when accepting the BRITs Global Icon Award the following year (followed by chips in Swift’s dressing room), but has continued to vocalise her support as Griff ventures into her very own next ‘era’. For an artist who cites ‘Fearless’ as the first pop album she ever fell in love with, it’s “mind blowing” that Swift supports her so vocally. “She really doesn’t have to publicly post my songs, she never posts. So it’s really kind of her to do that,” Griff says. “When I next see her, I’ll have to find some way of thanking her.”
Looking ahead to this year, Griff is preparing to embark on her first headline tour of Europe. “I’ve just done everything in the wrong order, and I’ve toured so much [with other artists] but I haven’t actually done my own shows yet,” she says. More than anything, though, she’s focusing her energy on the things that are within her control: performing, and releasing a debut album. As for the latter, she assures us that it “will happen at some point” – but only when Griff is ready. “Wherever either of those two things leave me,” she says, contently, “I’ll be very happy.”
‘vert1go vol.2’ is out on 5 April via Warner
Listen to Griff’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify and here on Apple Music
Words: Hollie Geraghty
Photography: Bella Howard
Styling: Kamran Rajput
Hair: Tomi Roppongi
Make-up: Michelle Dacillo
Label: Warner