ROSE GRAY - Louder, Please

It's January, it's cold, it's raining and the days are still short. There's no better time for the dance-pop album of the year to arrive, one equipped with just the right doses of escapism and positivity to project us, mind and body, toward other seasons. Too early to crown it 2025's best? I'll take that risk. Barring any genuine surprises from Shygirl or some DJ out of the Far East, what Rose Gray offers on "Louder, Please" doesn't shy away from comparisons, showing its author wrestling with a sonic vocabulary that looks straight into the glorious history of British club culture, twisting it toward glittering pop melodies, a personal tribute to the nu-disco era that made so many people sweat. By the end, asking to turn the volume up becomes a moral obligation.

In a genre that has found renewed footing in recent years, relying on performers and writers of varying prominence, finding the right balance to avoid sliding into the bleakest streamingcore is no simple feat at all. Thanks to experience built up over years of side releases and EPs, Gray has enough character to step into the role of the new summer queen, working on the two fundamentals that have always decided the success of dance music: songwriting and production. The melodies she comes up with don't have the immediate impact of the best Dua Lipa tracks, nor the sophistication of a Róisín Murphy, but they manage to find a happy middle ground, one that slips easily into the mechanics of the pop song while keeping an elliptical perspective, closer to the subversiveness of figures like Charli XCX and the rest of the hyper crew. The production choices follow the same logic, a concentrate of the best house music of the last thirty years, fitted out with hidden weapons though, collateral jolts that expand its potential, letting the shadowy corners show through, those slight flashes of nastiness that go beyond the by-the-numbers.

Seemingly an apocryphal track from peak-era Kylie Minogue, "Tectonic" quickly veers away from easy comparisons and takes on a more expansive ambience, a more liquid structure that wraps around Gray's voice like a mantle, capable of an irresistible sweetness. When it comes to baring its claws and playing the dancefloor diva, the author doesn't hold back: "Free" kicks off with a spirited synth outline that Clean Bandit would envy, before exploding into the chorus, as if Ibiza had suddenly been catapulted into an electric paradise, making concrete the freedom the title proclaims.

Gray's dance-floor songbook then opens onto trance pages that vibrate at the same frequencies as Fragma but with a far more frantic melodic approach (the party anthem "Party People"), and revisits Eurovision aesthetics in her own way, breaking down the contest's camp euphoria into jittery technoid segments ("Angel Of Satisfaction").

If you want that extra pinch of spice, "Switch" arrives at just the right moment, playing with allusions and ideas in a shimmering electro dress. Even when leaning more into evocation, venturing into the hypnotic territory that belongs to Kelly Lee Owens ("Hackney Wick"), Rose Gray keeps her feet firmly on the ground, clearly showing she's in full command of the material, having found here the necessary drive to fully assert her personality. So, surely you don't want to keep the volume down? Louder, please!

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26/01/2025