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.
Thank goodness, then, for London’s Rose Gray, whose sweat-soaked debut album fizzes with inventiveness. 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. But Gray also understands pop, with the campy Angel of Satisfaction stomping around a keening, early Gaga-esque chorus. The house-inflected Party People, meanwhile, would have nestled nicely on an 00s Ibiza Classics compilation mixed by Kaskade.
