Louder, Please
For Rose Gray, the club has always represented freedom. “If you’re going to the right places, all inhibitions are dropped and no one cares what you do,” the East London-born singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “There’s something primal about lots of people in a room listening to heavy drums.” Gray would know. Ever since her late teens, she’s spent every available moment immersed in nightlife, building a community of go-go dancers, promoters, and DJs who not only love clubbing but respect it, too. The music she makes is similarly reverent: scooping into the vast melting pot of dance music, she welds together everything from *Screamadelica*-inspired acid house, delectable nu-disco, subterranean future garage, and psychedelic trance. “I think there’s a real bond with anyone that makes dance music that means you’re allowed to take and borrow sounds and melodies and it’s celebrated,” she says. With this debut album, though, Gray set out to refine a sound that felt her own. Inspired by pop icons such as Kylie Minogue, Robyn, and *Ray of Light*-era Madonna, she recruited some best-in-biz collaborators, including songwriting master Justin Tranter, who signed Gray to their publishing house, Sega Bodega, Sam Homaee, Zhone, Sur Back, Uffie, and Alex Metric. The result is *Louder, Please*, a euphoric and chest-achingly candid distillation of British club culture and turn-of-the-millennium pop. “I had to really grab that sound by the horns,” Gray says. “I think this record is the most pop out of anything that I’ve done. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m ready to do this.’” The album title itself is another representation of Gray’s personality. “I’ve probably grown up being dangerously obsessed with loud music,” she says. “But the ‘please’ at the end is very me. I’m quite maximalist and I can be brash, but I will always be polite, which I think feels like some of the record. It’s heavy, but there’s a sweetness to it.” Read on for Rose Gray’s track-by-track guide to *Louder, Please*. **“Damn”** “I was writing with \[The Blessed Madonna collaborator\] Pat Alvarez and Caitlin Stubbs \[Dom Dolla, Bebe Rexha\]. We’d actually written a completely different song, but it went into this quite industrial techno record. The song is basically a stream of consciousness of me just blurting out all the things I do to keep myself sane. It has this introduction energy, to me. It feels like, ‘I have arrived.’ It’s maximalist and in your face. Also, if you pick apart the lyrics, there are Easter eggs to other songs on the album.” **“Free”** “I don’t like the word ‘spiritual,’ but this song feels connected. I was in LA when I wrote it and, lyrically, I definitely wanted to play on this idea that you might have everything, but really what matters is how you feel in yourself. I used to get goosebumps when I listened to it. It feels a bit more grounded than the rest of the album. I like that it comes after ‘Damn’ because it’s like the devil and then the angel as I bring in the sweet-summer, window-down, sun-kissing-your-skin vibes.” **“Wet & Wild”** “I’ve had moments, more so when I was a little bit younger, of leaving the club in a drunken state in a bit of a mic-drop moment. Maybe you’ve had a row or maybe the guy you’re with is flirting with someone else. So you’re just out the club, maybe you’re crying and sort of expecting your group of friends to know that you’ve left and want them to follow you. But that doesn’t happen because everyone’s having a great night and just thinks you’ve gone to the toilet or something. That’s what ‘Wet & Wild’ means. It’s a bit of an eff you! I’m going to run in the streets of the city, feel myself, and have a little cry.” **“Just Two”** “I worked on this song with Uffie, who has become a very good friend. I think she’s the coolest human ever. I’m in awe of her. I had actually written the chorus of the melody and had that on my phone, but I wanted to do something upbeat and have really ’90s chords. Having Uffie in the room just shaped it to become a little bit more underground. Lyrically, the song is about how, when you’ve found your person, there’s nothing better than being with them and sharing a life with them and all the things that you do just for a kiss. It’s quite cheeky.” **“Tectonic”** “I’m in a relationship with someone who is away a lot, and I wanted to use nature to describe that feeling of separation. I feel like we are connected, but when we’re away from each other, there’s a crashing of tectonic plates. I really enjoy the soundscape. Alex Metric, who I wrote it with, is such a little tech wizard that he has a lot of these synths from the ’90s. I think he actually bought some stuff off of William Orbit, who produced *Ray of Light*, which is one of my favorite albums ever. I could make a whole album in the world of this song.” **“Party People”** “Writing this song was a whirlwind. I met Sega Bodega a few times and he said I should come to Paris to write with him. People say they want to work with you, and it’s like, ‘Is it actually happening?’ We wrote three songs, including ‘Party People.’ It’s kind of a nursery rhyme. I feel like I am surrounded by party people and I’m fascinated by them, honestly. I have this group of friends, and if they were living in the late ’80s and ’90s, they would’ve been at every rave. I based the song on them and how they’re all very free. I think ‘Party People’ feels like I’m sat on the edges of a club or at some warehouse and I’m watching everything that’s happening. I’m obsessed with people that party.” **“Angel of Satisfaction”** “For the last couple of years, I’ve seen real success happen to friends. I’ve been at these industry things and you see the people that you grew up idolizing and who, in my eyes, have made it. And then I just always think, ‘Is that really what I want?’ There are a lot of questions I’m always asking myself. I definitely think that there are very healthy ways of doing it. But it’s quite a scary world out there. I wanted to create a song that was my debate on that subject, and I did have some sort of visualization of it in a dream. I explained that to Justin Tranter, and they were able to help make it digestible. In the end, we wrote it very quickly.” **“Switch”** “This song was written the first time I worked with Justin. It felt like things were aligning for me, and I felt a sort of switch personally that I had become the artist I envisioned I’d become as a 17-year-old. I just said, ‘I feel like things are really switching up for me.’ I knew that ‘switch’ was a great lyric. Justin and I talked for quite a while about what switch can mean, and we formed the song. I remember when I first wrote it, I thought it sounded like a game: bouncy, fun, candyfloss pop, but also quite sexy and hot if you look at the lyrics.” **“Hackney Wick”** “With this song, we had made the instrumental kind of roughly what it is now. I was trying lots of different vocal things on it and they just weren’t working. Then I said, ‘Can I just talk about some nights out on the mic?’ I used to go to these mad parties in Hackney Wick. We’d go from one party to the next, and then you’re on the canal and you’re having a beer and then you’re cuddling someone and the sun’s coming up. It was just such a fun time. I just felt the music really captures the energy of Hackney Wick. Then Caroline Sur Back \[Caroline Sans, aka experimental pop artist Sur Back\] created this beautiful string section, and I was like, ‘Why not? Why can it not now go into something really ethereal and romantic?’ That’s kind of how I feel about that whole time in my life, really.” **“First”** “I’m a very competitive person. Painfully competitive, in fact. I’ve got so much Capricorn in me and I’m working on it, but I’m always at the starting line, ready to go, and that kind of falls into relationships as well. It’s not a personal thing and I notice it with couples where they’re often competing with each other. I wanted to try and capture that in a song. I really enjoy the production. It’s another sprinkle of drum ’n’ bass. It’s a bit garage-y. I feel like the middle eight goes a bit dubstep.” **“Everything Changes (But I Won’t)”** “Obviously, I absolutely love the club, but there’s a whole side of me that’s very alternative and listens to lots of different music. I wanted to have at least one song that was bringing you down. I have probably been in love with the same person for most of my adult life. It’s very interesting growing up with someone and seeing us both change so much, yet still kind of remain the same. I would say that this is the only complete love song on the album. I wanted to create the feeling of me being in the middle of a storm where so much is happening around me, but I’m still very much grounded. I remember when Sean Wasabi, the producer, played the synth loop. I was like, ‘Wow, that really captures that feeling.’” **“Louder, Please”** “I created this with Caroline. I had written a song called ‘Louder’ that I really enjoyed the chorus for, and then I sung it through on a vocoder, just with piano. We sent it to Caroline with a few references, and, honestly, she sent back basically what the song is now. Similar to how ‘Damn’ was like an introduction, this feels like a closing. It’s like a warm hug. I got my little cousin, who, bless her, is just like a fairy, to say, ‘Can you play it a little louder, please?’ It felt cathartic to finish the album with a child’s voice. I think underneath it all, I just remember being little and asking my dad to play music louder.”
Rose Gray’s debut album ‘Louder, Please’ adds an enigmatic cutting edge to her upbeat dance-pop sound – read the NME review here
We are SO back. In the club, that is. Rose Gray’s sweaty, euphoric dance floor record, 'Louder, Please', is a 12-track homage to dance music and
The London musician’s assured debut runs the gamut from aggressive jungle to uplifting house, toggling between hedonism and introspection