Grace Carter

I was 17 when I came into the music industry and 19 when I started releasing music. Initially, I was independent and then signed to a major label later that year. Looking back, I realised I really had no idea who I was outside of the big emotions I was carrying.

My first project, "Why Her, Not Me", was about growing up with an absent parent. Writing it was one of the most healing experiences of my life, but I wasn't prepared for what came afterwards. Every day, I was revisiting the hardest parts of my childhood, reliving them on stage, in interviews and in the studio. Without the emotional support I needed around me, I eventually stopped processing that sadness and instead felt like I was defined by it.

Eventually, I realised I needed a reset. I wanted to rediscover who I was beyond the childhood trauma that had come to define both my music and much of my early twenties. So much life had happened since then, but I was scared to open up again.

Last year, I booked an impromptu flight to Stockholm, hoping a change of scenery might reignite the spark I'd been missing, and luckily for me, it did! In the space of ten days, I made something bigger than anything I could have hoped for. For the first time in a long time, I felt free. Nobody was expecting anything from me. Nobody was putting pressure on me. When I finally stopped putting that pressure on myself, the excitement I used to feel about music came rushing back.

I felt safe enough to be vulnerable again, but this time that vulnerability sounds different. It doesn't sound dark or heavy. It feels reflective, hopeful and optimistic, both lyrically and sonically. For years, I felt like my actual taste in music was never fully represented in what I was making. Because so much of my writing came from such emotional places, the sonics often felt secondary. With this new music, it was important that it felt like the records my girls and I genuinely love, whether that's SZA, Frank Ocean or Solange.

The songs I wrote in Stockholm are about that strange period in your twenties and thirties when the world no longer sees you as a child, even if part of you still feels like one. I call it my "adult adolescence"; navigating the pressure to settle down, get married, deal with changes in your body, and fall in and out of love. It's messy, confusing and beautiful, and for the first time it feels like a true reflection of who I am as a woman today.

'White' is the first chapter of that story. Written after the end of a seven-year relationship, it's a song about the pressure so many young women feel to settle down and find "the one" before time runs out. I recorded parts of the vocal sped up and slowed down to mirror that feeling of being rushed through life.

It's taken me a long time to get here, but this is the first time in years that I've felt genuinely excited to share my music. I can't wait for you to hear it, and I hope you love it as much as I do.

www.instagram.com/gracecarter