Annie DiRusso had never played in the UK before this week. As a self-confessed Anglophile, she’s living out her teenage dream by selling out her debut London gig, before turning her eyes to Brighton’s The Great Escape, which is where we catch up with the Next Big Thing in indie-rock singer-songwriting.

It’s almost a cliché now to say that British bands and artists dream of breaking America, but it feels pretty rare to find an American so excited to visit the UK. “In middle school, I was addicted to British YouTube,” Annie admits. “I loved Zoella and Joe Sugg, so coming to Brighton and seeing the supermarket they would go to or whatever is so surreal.’”

Her visit is not only a marker of her growing status within ‘the scene’, but it also speaks to the success of her recently released debut album ‘Super Pedestrian’, a record that stamped Annie’s name firmly onto the radars of fans and industry-heads alike. For Annie, a native New Yorker in the process of moving her life to Nashville, the concept of people outside of the States was as alien as it’s possible to be.

“I was so sure nobody was going to be at the London show, so to step out and not only see a full crowd, but people actually singing every word, was unbelievable. I’m glad people like it because you guys are so blunt over here; like, I’m from New York, and we’re considered to be pretty cut-throat, but London was even more so!”

As much as Annie’s life has been pretty much exclusively confined to the USA, there is something universally relatable in her songwriting, both in terms of style and sentiment. Using her own experiences with toxic situationships, family ties, and self-doubt, her endearingly tongue-in-cheek lyrical style makes her immensely personal songwriting feel like a conversation between friends.

“Maybe that’s why it works for a British crowd,” she ponders, “because there’s humour injected alongside the darkness. I’ve always had a very straightforward style which did cause some insecurity when I was at music college with these abstract artists, but I just love honesty in music; I love hearing an artist sing something that I’m like, ‘Damn, I’ve thought that, but I’d never say it aloud’. There’s no veil of metaphor. I like the cut of it when I write a lyric, and it almost hurts to write it out; I’m a very feelings-based songwriter.”

In many ways, this is both Annie’s superpower and her Kryptonite. After the release of her 2023 EP, ‘God, I Hate This Place’, Annie embarked on her own headline tour and also secured support slots for some of her favourite acts, including HAIM and beabadoobee. Whilst these were experiences she wouldn’t change for the world, playing arenas across the US made it hard for her to find any soul food from which she could find inspiration.

“I was so zoned in on touring that I lost touch of myself and what I wanted to say. It’s like, how many times can I write about touring in Texas?”

“I really struggle with change,” she continues, “so being away and seeing how much relationships changed and grew when I was away gave me so much anxiety about my place in the world. So much of me is my relationships, so when I came home, I really had to nourish and rebuild those relationships just to feel like myself.”

Given Annie’s self-proclaimed status as an emotional songwriter, it took her going back to basics to rediscover who she was outside of the Annie DiRusso musical persona.

“I was 23 when I came back from tour, so I just tried to be 23. I partied loads and drank a lot; I went on dates, I went to the grocery store. I was living life. I reframed the way I viewed everything; I locked in on prioritising life instead of work, and then ideas started to flow again.”

Those ideas formed the basis of what would become her debut album, ‘Super Pedestrian’, a gloriously gritty précis on her life as a 25-year-old, encompassing all the panic and power that can come from fraternal love, friends with benefits, and finally accepting that pain is just a part of life. Supporting these stories of mid-twenties modern life is a grungy, gritty guitar-led backdrop that travels from balladesque ‘Wearing Pants Again’ to shoegazey ‘I Am The Deer’ and 90s-inspired break-up banger ‘Good Ass Movie’.

As someone who has been a musician since she started studying music at college in 2018, the concept of a debut album was something that Annie had been fixated upon for the last seven years. When the time came to write it, though, the torturous process that had previously greeted her in the studio made way for the joy that had made her want to be a musician all those years ago.

“I never thought I’d be making my debut at 25,” she states, “but I’m actually glad it took so long; it happened at the right time. Everyone was going, ‘Ok, it’s time for an album’, but I was so scared because writing the EP was like pulling teeth. It was so dark; it was just all the stuff that had happened when I was 16 and had stuck with me.

“This time, it felt really natural, which I never anticipated. I was totally at peace with whatever happened; I was open to any idea that came out. Whatever we gravitated towards, we went with.”

The ‘we’ that Annie refers to includes her best friend and on-stage guitarist Eden and renowned alt-pop producer Caleb Wright, whose name finds itself attributed to the Hippo Campus back catalogue and to one of Annie’s heroes, Samia. It took just one meeting for Annie to know that this relationship would prove the perfect match for her debut LP.

“He was like a father figure. He’s the first producer to ever ask me what the record is about. He’d messaged me on Instagram about a year before just saying he loved what I was doing, and we have the same birthday, so it just felt like it was written in the stars.”

“But I still took more control over the producing process; I was in charge of making my own demos for the first time. I remember making ‘Legs’ in three days in Eden’s bedroom, we were like little kids discovering something. I get butterflies thinking about it. There was this childlike wonder; it was like a dream coming true.”

This sense of magic carried over to Wright’s studio in North Carolina, where Annie continued to lead the charge and dictate the terms, never once compromising on her newfound work-life balance.

“The studio was so easy; I was so comfortable. Because I’d reorganised what I cared about, there was no fatigue and no song that got away from me. It was a discovery period of what made me excited about life. It wasn’t just a collection of songs, either. I wrote all the songs in about 6–8 months, so they really speak to this new phase of my life.”

As much as Annie was in a more secure and centred place when she was writing ‘Super Pedestrian’, there is still a heaped spoonful of vulnerable introspection across the record. Lyrics like “I love pain as it’s settling in” (‘Wearing Pants Again’) and “Always looking for something to change my life / Never wanna hear nothing to change my mind” (‘Ovid’), speak to a songwriter in tune with their own misgivings and quirks of personality that add untold depths and nuance to the record.

Alongside peers such as Blondshell, Soccer Mommy and Bully, Annie is at her best when she’s being totally transparent about all the experiences that have helped her to reach this confident yet considered place in her life.

“When I was trying to refocus on what was important, I learned at what point discomfort becomes worth it. I want to make art that says something, not just to show someone that I can do it. So this record was basically about balancing peace with discomfort, singing about stuff that hurt me, but being fine with it.”

This peace manifests itself in the humour that finds its way into a spoken word adlib on ‘Good Ass Movie’, a fun-filled ode to her dad in ‘Derek Jeter’, and a long-lens view at a toxic ex in gloriously gory ‘Hungry’. As Annie puts it, “I’m just a girl writing about ridiculous stuff that’s happened.” In putting her personal recollections down on paper, she makes them universal.

‘Super Pedestrian’ came out about two months before this chat outside an ice cream shop in Brighton’s Lanes, giving Annie time to reflect on the album post-release. In that time, she’s been on the first leg of a US headline tour, playing songs that are designed to reverberate around big rooms. How was the reception across the pond?

“The first night of the album tour was Kansas on a Monday night – who booked that?!” she giggles. “I think it was about a week after the album had come out, so I was expecting to have to win over the crowd, but people were in the front row singing all of the words back to me. After all the times when I felt real imposter syndrome, that was the first time I felt like an artist.”

Throughout the time we’ve been with Annie, her smile has never left her face, beaming with pride about the person she is and the artist she has become. If we’d met her two years ago, or maybe even more recently than that, we would have met someone uncertain of their place in their own life, someone hesitant to make their next move for fear of the career she’d built crumbling down. The fact that we’ve just seen her play a stripped-back set in a full-up comedy club symbolises that she doesn’t need to be anything other than herself to be successful.

“I always loved the record, but I love it even more now it’s out,” Annie reveals. “It’s weird to say, but I can’t wait to make more records. I never thought I’d say that.”

From ‘Super Pedestrian’ to superstar, Annie DiRusso is starting to realise her potential. Watch out world, she’s coming. ■

Taken from the July 2025 issue of Dork.