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Rose Gray: Louder, Please review – escapist dance-pop fizzes with inventiveness
The London musician’s assured debut runs the gamut from aggressive jungle to uplifting house, toggling between hedonism and introspection
The last few years have proved tricky for female-fronted dance-pop, with interesting artists wasting away as guest vocalists on songs credited to male DJs with perfect teeth, or siloed into dead ends soundtracked by an efficient amalgam of drum’n’bass and sticky-floor EDM. She’s clearly a fan of dance music’s more experimental potential – opener Damn is an aggressively filtered jungle onslaught, while collaborators include producer Sega Bodega (Caroline Polachek, Shygirl) and electropop cult figure Uffie. Hedonism is a key lyrical theme – Wet & Wild, all smile-inducing house pianos and breathy, Kylie-esque vocals, should come with its own bottle of room odouriser – but on tracks like Switch, about a tricky long-distance relationship, Gray looks inwards, searching for new ways to sustain a connection.
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