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Photo: Frances Beach

With no patience for coddling nor humility for empathy, Griff’s “Vertigo” provides the validity in a very crucial stop in the grieving process: anger.

The youngest winner of the Brit Awards’ Rising Star category, UK-bred Chinese-Jamaican songstress Griff is no stranger to success and critical acclaim. She’s set stages alive opening up for acts like Dua Lipa and Coldplay, bridging vulnerability and euphoria with her cathartic, youthful pop. Only a few days born, this newest single has already earned over a million streams, making “Vertigo” one of Griff’s fastest rising songs yet. The artist is finding her face plastered on billboards and her voice nestling comfortably on playlists across all platforms, marking an undeniable unleveling in her emerging stardom.

Written in the English countryside, you can feel how raw skinned Griff was at the time of the song’s inception. Out of sorts and nauseated with the disappointment of her lover’s cowardice, Griff is elegantly confrontational on “Vertigo.” With ridding lines like “I’m used to fixing broken things before / I thought maybe I could change you,” it’s clear why this song is so immediately resonant. We’re all seeing ourselves in that clinging to be chosen, the performance of what we could be, and the souring of it not being enough. 

“When someone leaves your life, you spend a lot of time asking if it was your fault. This song lists all those reasons why it could be, but it’s also about trying to reassure yourself that there was nothing you could have done to make it better. With the way it crescendos, I’ve always heard it as a bit of an emotional rollercoaster,” shares Griff. “There’s a darkness to ‘Vertigo’ that maybe I haven’t tapped into as much before,” she continued. “It’s still major, but there’s something quite dark and moody about it too.”

Even Taylor Swift declared herself a fan, sharing the song via Instagram story accompanied with the message “damn griff, I love this one,” much to the songstress’ disbelief. It’s a sobering moment when your idols acknowledge the brilliance they see in you, and with Griff’s earliest memory of music being a gifted iPod shuffle with Taylor Swift’s Fearless downloaded, this full circle moment marks Griff’s true initiation into the pop realm at large.

Watch the "Vertigo" visualizer below: