Her debut mixtape, 2021’s One Foot In Front of the Other, combined the hooky melodicism of a Swift cut with the punchy, emotional production of Carly Rae Jepsen’s strongest work, immediately personal and relatable. She followed up with “One Night” and “Head on Fire,” a collaboration with Sigrid that continued her creative force and a player in the pop game. Vertigo, her debut album, arrives years after her first breakthrough – during which she won the BRIT Award for Rising Pop Star in 2021 — and might benefit from a clearer artistic sentiment.
Released in three parts, Vertigo comes together a little randomly, as all debut pop albums do – a broad smattering of work to examine what sticks. (The buzziest pop record on the planet right now, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, operates the same way). It’s clear what sticks for Griff – big emotions and big peaks. Vertigo’s title track is a songwriting swing-and-miss (“Couldn’t take the heat, that’s Mexico”) that crescendos into a tremendous bridge admonishing a wishy-washy partner (“You ran from love, that’s nothing new”) which continues into “Miss Me More,” a track that could add to the summer of big pop smashes if people would pay attention. A breakup anthem that takes a swing at niceties of the music industry (“I drunk the drinks, I shook the hands / And I believed the plan”), it’s an ode to her past self, a before-time when she felt truer, perhaps when the eyes of the press weren’t on her. “I miss staring at the walls / I miss sleeping to the sounds of the kids next door,” she sings on the explosive post-chorus.
Vertigo continues, perhaps a little slowly, through its consistent and well-crafted songs. “Into The Walls,” “19th Hour,” “Anything,” and “Cycles” are all fun while they last, but become forgettable as they pass, a symptom of the pop machine. Often, her writing devolves into naivete that was absent on previous releases – her pillow “loves me in the morning and it loves me in the evening / … it’s all that I’ve got left,” and she halts the flow on “Astronaut,” a mandatory-seeming ballad that takes the metaphor of “needing space” to its limits. Likewise, “Hole In My Pocket” plods, detailing the loss of loose change, friends and family, then a partner. Only on the quick bridge does she investigate her losses, but it doesn’t go deep enough into introspection. On “Into The Walls,” she sings, “Yesterday, I felt like dancin’ / Today, maybe I’ll cry,” deconstructing the ethos of depressing bangers like “Dancing On My Own” so that the whiplash of simultaneous action is gone. It’s not memorable that you go home to cry, no less the next day; the image of sadness on the dancefloor is most striking.
Griff is only 23 and she already has plenty of great songs under her name – some even found on Vertigo. But amongst its entertaining cuts, the album comes across as too streamlined; contemporaries like Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo make a name for themselves with bursting personality; Sabrina Carpenter is doing the same thing with a winking sense of humour. Griff has a talent made for the stage, but Vertigo is often hindered by its avoidance of risks.
