Griff - vertigo

Griff is a pop craftsman: her debut mixtape, the self-produced ‘One Foot In Front Of The Other’, embraced full, crisp pop convention to turn its cliches sincere. Here, on the BRITs’ 2021 Rising Star’s debut album, ‘vertigo’, she makes a decent effort to sustain this brilliance. The echoing heartbeats of its title track and the dreamy, repetitious rumination of ‘Into The Walls’ showcase a deft popular music songwriting ability that appeals to an easy listen, guided by a skillful hand. Its production is still huge: there’s the rollicking Scandipop scope of ‘Anything’, which at first is vast and cinematic then punchy and preppy, and the almost-influence of French experimentalist Oklou’s transcendental synthpop across ‘Pillow In Your Arms’, or even the glitchy, Mura Masa-produced ‘Cycles’ and the warming choir of Griffs that memorialise ‘Tears For Fun’. 

But where ‘One Foot In Front Of The Other’ saw her present a distilled version of herself, the 14-track ‘vertigo’ is at times spread a little thin. The grief-stricken puns of‘Astronaut’ are certainly heart-wrenching if not a little rudimentary, and then, after affirming such a strong grip in grandiose pop hook making, the debut’s back end falls off a little too quietly, closing with an (at least intriguing) folktronic Imogen Heap-inspired ballad that does well to reassert Griff’s songwriting prowess, but leaves a pop shaped hole. Regardless, the sum of ‘vertigo’’s parts is triumphant in quality: there’s not a single corner left unpolished.