REVIEW: Griff releases her debut album 'Vertigo'

Published 12 July 2024
Griff is one of the most exciting - and special - artists to emerge from the UK in the last five years. Her meteoric rise has seen her go from writing and producing her own music in her bedroom, to Brit Award winner and touring support act for Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa and Coldplay.

Today she releases her debut album Vertigo, which has been preceded by two EPs (vert1go vol. 1 and vert2go vol. 2). The album contains the eight tracks from those EPs plus six new tracks, and showcases Griff at her absolute best. One of the strengths of Griff’s artistry is her ability to authentically portray the awkwardness, confusion, pain, joy and displacement of growing from a child into an adult, and Vertigo explores this difficult and critical life chapter with truth and heart.

Rooted in classic pop production, the soundscape of the album ranges from contemporary pop to abstract dance music through to flirtations with glam rock. Lyrically, Griff conveys her life experiences in raw honesty but with a complete lack of pretension and mawkish sentimentality. While the theme of crossing the life stage between teenager and young adult is not a foreign one in music, it is regularly addressed from the angle of how much harder life is as an adult, while Griff presents a more nuanced, perhaps more melancholic view based on how our emotions, our understanding of love and relationships and ability to dream and wonder transform as we get older, often for the worse.

It is a topic that she perhaps conveys best in the single ‘Miss Me Too’. Against an increasingly driving and dance friendly beat, she sings of looking back at her youth, to a time of wonderment when the bedroom ceiling felt insurmountably high, or simply running down a country lane was a journey of discovery and fascination, and mourning that that part of her is irrevocably lost. ‘Cause I felt something, yeah, I felt alive / I miss me, I miss me too.’

Title track ‘Vertigo’ opens the album and remains as majestic, cinematic and spine tingling as it was when it was released as the first single from the album last year. With a spacey, ethereal-electro feel it fluctuates between swelling vocals and beats before suddenly dropping out to calmer, more mellow sounds.

‘Anything’ has a joyful, pop sound which is contrasted with at times brutal lyrics that sees Griff look back on a relationship with a person she was so obsessed with she would do anything for, but who ultimately broke her when she realised they didn’t care. ‘Just to know I was yours at least for another night / Maybe I craved you so much cause I knеw you were nevеr mine…And I hate how much that you took away / Like my confidence was yours to take.’

‘Cycles’ is one of the most experimental - and mesmerising - songs on the album. First heard on the vert2go vol. 2 EP and produced by electronic artist Mura Masa, it is a trippy, housey electro-dance-pop track with a infectious beat and an abstract, almost lyric-less chorus which wouldn’t sound out of place on the coolest nightclub dancefloor in town.

On latest single ‘Tears For Fun’, Griff evokes the sound of 1980s glam rock crossed with synthpop, all overlaid with a 2024 pop vibe. Again Griff connects deeply, with an unvarnished look at when you know everything about a relationship is wrong but you cannot move past it, never quite sure if you will ever recover from it. ‘When it kills your heart but you can’t say no / When it burns you red but you won’t let go / The deepest cuts heal so slow / I hope they do but what if they don’t?’ she sings. The song ends with Griff plaintively singing ‘I hope they do but what if they don’t?’ as the music cuts out, leaving her in a silence that drips with heartbreak, confusion and a soul that feels completely lost.

‘Hiding Alone’ also brings a swinging, 1980s pop-rock feel to the album with enough contemporary overtones to move it out of the cheesy arena into gloriously nostalgic, while ‘Everlasting’ is a gorgeously pared back electronic track that emotively looks at the fears of getting older and losing your way, a topic Griff conveys so well: ‘I’ve seen pictures from decades ago / When everything seemed so unbroken / All their hopes and their dreams were before them / God I wonder what came and destroyed them…I get scared we will end up like them’ she sings.

A live version of ‘So Fast’ demonstrates the strength of Griff’s voice as well as how even if you strip away all the studio production and have her perform with just her voice and a guitar she remains an incredibly powerful and compelling artist.

The album ends on the beautiful ‘Where Did You Go’. With a distorted, disjointed, fuzzy structure, Griff sings of missing the one important person in her life - ‘I turned all the carpets upside down / I went into your room and weren’t to be found…I handed posters around the town’ - only to turn the tables and repeat the story to show Griff herself leaving the relationship and her partner desperately missing her. “I think we both know / That I’m not yours anymore…where did I go? / Do you even want to know?” she asks at the end of the song. It is a remarkably moving song, expertly crafted lyrically and sonically that ends the album on perhaps a melancholic note, but in a way this sums up the beauty of Griff. Her music is nothing short of an emotional journey and the overriding feeling you walk away from the album with is a sense of connection and release, as if you have just spend time bonding, laughing and crying with your closest friend.

Vertigo is nothing short of a triumph, but given Griff’s credentials to date is that really much of a surprise? What is impressive is just how accomplished and confident her music is, and how she can brilliantly sustain a journey and a story over 14 tracks with a range and versatility artists with double her experience can struggle to achieve. Undoubtedly one of the greatest albums of 2024, and it is now quite clear Griff is well on the path to world domination.

Vertigo is out now via Warner Music. You can buy and stream here.
Follow Griff on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

Read our six page interview with Griff in Women In Pop magazine issue 16