On June 22, past Uproxx cover artist Griff opened for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour at London’s Wembley Stadium. It was far from the first time Griff had serenaded tens of thousands of people in a stadium, seeing as she previously opened for Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia Tour, Ed Sheeran’s Mathematics Tour, and Coldplay’s Music Of The Spheres World Tour. But the 23-year-old born Sarah Griffiths has yet to wrap her head around anyone hearing her music.
“Music has always been a me thing,” Griff says over from the phone from Los Angeles. “I wanted to be a songwriter because it was the place that felt good, and I felt confident. Pursuing a pop career was something I fell into. I love performing, and I love building a community of people who connect with the music, but I struggle with the demand that it brings to be so forward-facing and always begging people to approve. It has made me have a weird relationship with songs because songs are always my safe place. Putting them out in the world is almost uncomfortable because it changes the meaning of songwriting for me. It’s become this thing that is now up for other people’s critique or opinion.”
Vertigo, Griff’s newly released debut full-length album, purposefully arrived in three parts because Griff wanted to share an authentic, real-time chronicling of her ongoing evolution from intensely introverted to forward-facing. The entire album showcases Griff embracing impermanent emotion — an inescapable aspect of the human condition. When asked about how her songs are interpreted, she giggles and says, “I mean, I like to think I’m pretty clear with my feelings of despair.” Fair play. “Anything,” which Griff debuted during her opening Eras set, finds her re-examining her past desperation to rightsize a power imbalance in a toxic relationship. The effervescent “Vertigo” contains such blatant, punchy hooks that Swift was left relatively speechless, posting, “Damn, Griff.”
Still, it’s impossible to resist mining her clever, nuanced lyrics for broader metaphorical application. For instance, “Into The Walls” captures a fleeting impulse to temporarily disappear and hits harder now that Griff’s anonymity has permanently disappeared. And when she opens “Hiding Alone” by softly singing, “I’m like a house / Where the windows and the curtains don’t close,” she’s incidentally describing her bare songwriting and why her songs have a chokehold on millions of people.
Griff “very practically” protected the purity of songwriting when crafting Vertigo. In between touring, she’d book Airbnbs in the English countryside, mimicking the environment in which she fell in love with music. Half-Chinese, half-Jamaican, Griff sensed eyes on her from a young age while growing up in the primarily white village of Kings Langley, Hertfordshire. At home, solitude was a luxury after her parents decided to foster children when she was eight years old. It was “chaos,” but Griff and her two older brothers never resented it.
“I was really aware that it was something my mom felt called to do in her spirit, and it was more about helping people and loving people that are less fortunate or haven’t had the privilege of a family unit,” Griff says. “It is obviously still such a big shift at eight years old — to have new siblings — but I was always aware of the purpose. It was about living a life of being selfless.”
Now, Griff gives her fans somewhere to belong through selfless vulnerability. First, she had to be selfish. She went out of her way to engender independence — turning to music because she “didn’t need everyone else’s approval” to write songs, make beats, listen to them on the school bus, and then work on them again. Also at eight, Griff discovered Swift’s Fearless when her cousin gave her his iPod Nano with the album on it.
“It’s funny because the concept of fandom is only a new thing that I’m realizing and experiencing,” she says. “Back then, I didn’t realize I was such a fan, but I listened to it nonstop. We weren’t allowed to watch TV during the week, so you had a lot of time to listen to music and think. I grew up around soul and R&B, so it was more the revelation of, like, ‘Oh my God, I can actually play these songs. I know a C chord, and I know a D chord.’ I felt like I could recreate these major pop melodies.”
Eventually, Griff created a pop vein all her own. Griff signed with Warner Records in 2019 and firmly established herself in 2021. She won the BRITs Rising Star Award and released her debut mixtape One Foot In Front Of The Other, featuring cover artwork showing her on a tightrope to depict the fear of falling at any moment — a sensation that persists despite overwhelming evidence that she’s here to stay.
“It’s a very human feeling, especially when there’s no manuscript for what it is to pursue a career in pop music,” she says. “Every day, I’ve been trying to make sense of what it is to make this a job. I felt the pressure a lot writing this album, hence me actually physically having to go away and try and shut it all out. If you can’t tell already by my songs, I’m very in my head. Those normal pressures definitely creep in a lot.”
Vertigo arrives as her debut LP well after Griff debuted in so many other ways, but the album is introducing her to all the ways in which she can profoundly impact others. She’s learning to accept external validation, even if it will never serve as her barometer for success or self-worth.
Griff loves accepting gifts from fans at shows — a soft Asian cat toy now serves as her go-to pin cushion when sewing — and gave away her handmade stage dress from The Eras Tour. She’s still getting used to performing “Vertigo” and witnessing fans scream-sing back to her, “Couldn’t take the heat, that’s Mexico!” At Wembley on June 22, Swift told 90,000 people, “I love her so much,” and Griff lost it because, well, does anyone ever get used to that?
“The timeline has been so strange for everyone,” Griff says. “I got started in the pandemic, and from the pandemic to now, where has the time gone? I’ve done a lot of touring but not headlines. Weirdly, for the last two years, I haven’t really heard people sing back my songs. Doing my own tour was such an amazing experience to see people actually are listening, and people still want to buy tickets a couple of years after these songs were released.”
On the back of Vertigo, people are buying tickets to Griff’s headlining Vertigo World Tour, and Griff is equally excited to open on Sabrina Carpenter’s The Short N’ Sweet Tour this fall. She reckons it’ll feel “surreal” to play venues like Los Angeles’ The Wiltern, London’s Alexandra Palace, or New York City’s Terminal 5, but she ultimately hopes her songs meet people wherever they need to be met.
“I’m really looking forward to people living with this body of work,” she says, “and I really hope people love it.”