The last few years have proved tricky for female-fronted dance-pop, with interesting artists wasting away as guest vocalists on songs credited to male DJs with perfect teeth, or siloed into dead ends soundtracked by an efficient amalgam of drum’n’bass and sticky-floor EDM.
Thank goodness, then, for London’s Rose Gray, whose sweat-soaked debut album fizzes with inventiveness. She’s clearly a fan of dance music’s more experimental potential – opener Damn is an aggressively filtered jungle onslaught, while collaborators include producer Sega Bodega (Caroline Polachek, Shygirl) and electropop cult figure Uffie. But Gray also understands pop, with the campy Angel of Satisfaction stomping around a keening, early Gaga-esque chorus. The house-inflected Party People, meanwhile, would have nestled nicely on an 00s Ibiza Classics compilation mixed by Kaskade.
Hedonism is a key lyrical theme – Wet & Wild, all smile-inducing house pianos and breathy, Kylie-esque vocals, should come with its own bottle of room odouriser – but on tracks like Switch, about a tricky long-distance relationship, Gray looks inwards, searching for new ways to sustain a connection. Equally atmospheric is the spoken-word Hackney Wick, which charts a night out but focuses on relatable communion rather than focus-grouped exhortations to put your hands up.
There’s a comedown of sorts on the mid-tempo Everything Changes (But I Won’t), which saturates Gray’s voice in so many effects that its emotional impact is somewhat diluted. She’s better on tracks like Free, with its mantra-like chorus “The good shit in life is always free”, creating escapist dance-pop anthems that pierce the heart.
