Just off tour with Taylor Swift, upcoming dates with Sabrina Carpenter, and her long-awaited debut finally out in the world - Griff is having a banner year.

Words: Ali Shutler.

"There's this feeling that my debut album needs to be really great," Griff told Dork last year, a few days before she released what would become the title-track. Good news: 'Vertigo' is even better than 'really great'.

But it's easy to see why she was feeling the pressure. After releasing a string of singles, Griff became a comforting voice during lockdown with her emotionally-driven pop ballads before she won the BRIT Rising Star Award in 2021. Her performance at the ceremony was her second-ever live gig, as she shared a stage with the likes of Elton John, Olivia Rodrigo and The Weeknd. A summer of festival main stages followed, as 'Black Hole' became a viral smash while debut mixtape 'One Foot In Front Of The Other' crashed into the top five of the UK Albums Chart. A handful of remixes and collabs followed, but Griff spent a majority of the next two years opening shows for massive artists. Her first proper tour was a three-month run supporting Dua Lipa on her Future Nostalgia arena tour before she took to stadiums with Ed Sheeran and Coldplay. All the while, no new music was being released. "I guess my career has been pretty upside down so far," says Griff. "Every single step has felt like being thrown into the deep end in the most amazing way."

"However, I definitely felt the pressure, and I don't think I responded to it very well," Griff admits. "I'm my own worst critic and make things ten times worse by overthinking everything," she says, but she also felt a mounting expectation to make another 'Black Hole'.

"There were so many moments where we could have gone and chased that tail, but I knew it wouldn't be a fruitful process for me," Griff continues, having always prioritised new and interesting over safe and comfortable. "It would have been so easy for my team or whoever to tell me what my debut album needed to be, but I had to find my own gut in all of it," she adds.

Griff's long-awaited debut album 'Vertigo' is everything you could want from the rising star, and more. There are euphoric, dance-infused pop bangers and moments of stripped-down heartbreak. It's gorgeous and uplifting but isn't afraid of twisting the knife or delivering a smirking lyric with a wink either. "It was really daunting going into it because there's no manual for making a debut album," she explains. "You really do just have to make it up as you go along."

Taking things into her own hands, the entire album was written in scrappy little bursts between massive tours, with Griff avoiding professional recording studios to write in random Airbnbs. "It was the first time I had to write for something that I knew would be released, and there was an expectation that came with that. The idea of stepping into a studio felt like too much," she says, especially with her label paying for each and every hour of studio time. "I know that people listen to me for honest stories and interesting pop music. I didn't want to fall short of that just because there was this ticking clock."

This casual approach to trick herself into writing an album meant that Griff had soon amassed a Dropbox folder with close to 100 songs in it. "There's nothing like producing a song you've written to make you bored of it so it really boiled down to what still moved me," she explains of how she picked the 14 that would become 'Vertigo'. "There's so much fucking good pop music this year," she continues, namedropping Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter. "Pop is really inspiring right now, and I wanted to make sure my album had stories that felt as new and fresh."