It’s a rainy day in London, and Rose Gray is posing for her NME Cover shoot on a hotel bed overlooking Hyde Park in a red Libertines military jacket. Not just one inspired by the iconic band that became the de facto uniform of noughties indie rock, but the one literally owned by co-frontman Carl Barât, picked up from his storage unit the day before.
“I requested it specifically,” 28-year-old Gray says giddily over Zoom from her Mexico City hotel room some weeks later. The pair share management, so thanks to a moodboard, a few cheeky calls and a carefully sealed garment bag, she was able to live out her 2000s indie sleaze dream. “I felt like Kate Moss!”
In many ways, throwing big ideas out into the universe and seeing where they land could be the tagline of Rose Gray’s 2025. She started the year with the release of her debut album, ‘Louder, Please’, a glittering gem of dance-pop euphoria that’s a love letter to partying (‘Free’, ‘Party People’, ‘Wet & Wild’) and a vulnerable dissection of the intimate moments of life between the strobe lights (‘Hackney Wick’, ‘Everything Changes (But I Won’t)’, ‘Switch’). Laced with genre easter eggs like techno, garage and house, which permeated Gray’s upbringing as a 2010s London-born-and-raised club kid fed on ’90s dance, the record paints a picture of an artist who’s been percolating in the shadows until the right moment came along. The response was almost immediate. In one fell swoop, a new ascendant pop girl was born.
“At the beginning of the year, I had three shows in my diary,” she says. “I’ve now done 79 shows. It has all unfolded quite quickly.”
After that handful of standalone gigs came support slots with dance duo Confidence Man, Sugababes and pop mother supreme Kesha. Then came the ‘Louder, Please’ headline tour, to which more dates were added by the day, across the UK, Europe, North and South America. “I’m so in my body now,” Gray says about how her stage craft has evolved as she’s performed more. “I really just lose myself on stage, and at the beginning of the year, that wasn’t happening. I think I was still a bit shy. I grew up watching these icons, and you see them on stage, and you’re like, ‘Wow, how are they so there in their voice and their body and everything?’ Now I get it. You get to a place where you feel very alive on stage.”
Our call takes place on a rare off day in Mexico City, in a brief window between taco pit stops, following shows in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. For a studied scholar of the pop girlies (she says she could probably “write a thesis on pop music”), having her own ‘come to Brazil’ moment is not lost on her. “It’s very real,” she laughs. “The shows were mental. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m really touching these people’s lives thousands of miles away from where the song was written’.”
“I am craving a little bit of normality, but there are so many years for that”
All of a sudden, hotels have become a familiar backdrop, and not just for photoshoots. Gray is tired, but grateful – the fatigue that washes over her proof of her success. “I actually really enjoy travelling. I think there’s something about me that’s always been a bit nomadic. So this kind of life is definitely for me,” she says. But it has been an adjustment abandoning her usual routine in East London with her family, friends and Misty Blue, the beloved cat she shares with her partner, the actor Harris Dickinson. “I love a weekend in London. I have my little rituals, and I love meeting my mates at the pub and going for a walk on the canal. I don’t think I’ve done that this year, but the things I’m doing [instead] are just beyond my wildest dreams. I am craving a little bit of normality, but there are so many years for that.”
It may seem like Gray’s rise has come very suddenly and all at once – just last week, she was named to the 2026 BRITs Critics’ Choice shortlist, and ‘Louder, Please’ to NME’s list of the best albums of 2025 – but this kismet moment of pop girl magic has been an exercise in patience. She thrust herself into the industry straight out of school, signing a sketchy record deal that left her having to abandon over 100 unreleased tracks. But by her own admission, she’s “addicted to making music”, and steadily rebuilt her catalogue, releasing the EPs ‘Drinking, Dancing, Talking, Thinking’ in 2021, and ‘Synchronicity’ the following year. A constant stream of releases since built up to the big drop of ‘Louder, Please’ and its behemoth deluxe edition, ‘A Little Louder, Please’, which landed in October.
“The attitude that I had with ‘Louder, Please’, is that I didn’t know I was bringing out an album, I didn’t really have the support of my label at the time, I didn’t really have a fan base – not really. I just knew I had to put it out. I just had to keep making music,” she says.
‘A Little Louder, Please’ came from that insatiable need to keep creating. The double album is part rework and part bonus content, with new songs that didn’t make the cut the first time around and innovative remixes of ‘Louder, Please’’s tracklist à la Charli XCX’s ‘Brat’ and ‘It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat’.
“It was actually very fulfilling,” she says. “Much more fulfilling than I thought. Already having ‘Louder, Please’ [means] I didn’t feel that much pressure – it was just very fun. There was a lot of experimenting. Some of the songs on the deluxe are really alternative and weird, and it’s fun to explore that part of my artistry.”
The guest spots also read like a pop fan’s ultimate dinner party – Mel C, Shygirl, Peach, and JADE, who cheekily jumps on a remix of ‘Angel Of Satisfaction’. Not unlike the Little Mix singer’s own ‘Angel Of My Dreams’, the track excoriates the gilded sheen of music industry fame and success.
“Me and Jade became online Instagram friends, as you do, and we were talking about how much we love each other’s ‘Angel…’ songs,” she says of the link-up. “She’s a real one. We just got in the studio and wrote it together. Really easy.”
“I just knew I had to put ‘Louder, Please’ out. I just had to keep making music”
Both songs touch on the revolving door nature of ‘the next big thing’ that, historically, pitted the kind of female stars Gray grew up idolising disproportionately against each other. She says the current pop landscape means more space has opened up to coexist without that outside influence. “We all get compared to people, [but] I don’t really feel competition. The pop girls, I feel like we all talk, and we’re all mates.”
Collabing with artists she grew up burning CDs of, DMing her faves and actually getting a response, calling up for a Libertines jacket and getting it expedited to a shoot – it all still feels a bit alien to Gray, who’s still playing catch-up to a runaway train. “It is mad,” she says. “I looked up a playlist the other day, and it was, like, Robyn, it was me, it was Charli, it was Kylie, it was Björk with Rosalía. I was like, ‘Wow, I’m with the girls!’”
There’s no amount of preparation that comes for the kind of year Gray has had. One thing that’s been a saving grace is her intentional move to stop overthinking everything, which has had a ripple effect on every aspect of her artistry, from performing live to recording songs in the studio.
“Before the album came out, before I started my album campaign, I just felt quite confused [about whether] I was gonna have a long career in music,” she says. “I spent my whole twenties wanting success, wanting to be on the radio, wanting to play shows. And then when I got to 25, I was like, maybe you need to stop wanting it so much.
“For years, people would always say to me, ‘Why are you not bigger?’ Nobody should ever say that to anybody,” she says, laughing now, though it obviously hit a sore spot at the time. “It sounds very airy fairy, but last year I did a retreat, and I practised this detachment to the idea of success, because I’d spent so long wanting it. I don’t know if it was all just perfect timing, but the moment I did that, I actually started receiving so much more.”
“I know I put out a great album, and I’m loving it, but I do have this sense that there’s still so much more to come”
While her world swirls around her, Gray focuses on the thing that got her here in the first place – the music. That itch to keep making more and more travels with her wherever she goes in the form of Notes app brain-dumps and voicenotes, and she’s constantly getting in the studio with a small core group of collaborators that make laying down tracks feel like a never-ending conversation rather than something new every time. She’s already got songs in the tank for album two, though she’s not ready to share them just yet. “I’m definitely growing and experimenting,” she says, “and maybe adding some guitars”, like Madonna circa 2000.
The year may be coming to a close, but Gray isn’t looking to slow down any time soon. It’s her birthday on New Year’s Eve (the ultimate party girl introduction to the world!), so she wants to start a tradition of dropping something to kick off the good vibes of the coming year. (“I put out ‘Party People’ on New Year’s Eve, so I think I might maybe be doing something this New Year’s as well.”)
With a moment that feels a decade in the making, she is also ready to cling on tight rather than loosen the reins now that the pace has started picking up. “I still feel at the cusp of something,” she says confidently. “I know I put out a great album, and I know I’ve done a deluxe that’s being received, and I’m loving it, but I do still have this sense that there’s still so much more to come.”
Rose Gray’s ‘A Little Louder, Please’ is out now via Polydor Records.
Listen to Rose Gray’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify and on Apple Music here.
Words: Lucy Ford
Photography: Lo Harley
Makeup: Elaine Lynskey
Hair: Emma May Fordham using Bed Head
Styling: Bella Purse
Styling Assistance: Maia Burt, Chantelle Oliver, Alana Davids
Location: The Columbia Hotel
Label: Polydor Records
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