Stepping inside the mind of Saya Gray is a whirlwind experience. Her musings on music, life and identity come and go at hurricane speed – something NME finds out when we attempt to get a handle on an artist who can barely keep up with herself. “I change like a chameleon. I can literally have red hair one day and then be bald the next day and be a completely different person,” she explains over video call, her face framed by the taut drawstring of her hoodie and chunky black sunglasses. “I change a lot and I’ll continue changing, and then I document as I go.”
When we meet the Toronto-born alt-pop innovator on a Friday evening, we find her in the midst of one of these transformations. Earlier in the week, she drove from Los Angeles to New York in the span of five days with six cats and two dogs in the car. “Honestly, the cats were doing better than me; they were thriving,” she admits, one feline friend trotting carelessly across the piano just a few minutes later. This life upheaval came just over two weeks before the release of her debut album, ‘Saya’, which captures an artist in flux. “It was a lot of heartbreak, a lot of transition. It was isolation, in a good way,” she shares.
Slowing down and taking stock certainly doesn’t come easy to Gray. Signed to indie pop label Dirty Hit – home of The 1975 and Beabadoobee – her previous ‘Qwerty’ EP series was born out of “chaos”, their scrambled samples, scattered sonics and decontextualised song titles capturing snapshots of their creator amid the turmoil. These arrived as abstract, lawless evolutions of her debut EP, ‘19 Masters’, a multi-genre melting pot where professional and personal anxieties collided through yearning vocals and folksy guitar laments. Before that, she’d spent her teens and early twenties working as a live band musician, performing as a touring bassist and musical director for Daniel Caesar and Willow Smith.
Now, after some five years of officially releasing solo music, she’s compressed her idiosyncratic impulses into a body of work she can confidently declare her most intentional to date. Up until this point, even she has struggled to recognise herself in the murky abyss of her multi-layered creations, dictated by the instincts of a creative “flow state”. “I can’t even listen to ‘Qwerty’. I’m like, ‘What’s going on? I don’t even know what’s happening’,” she laughs. “I remember how I felt in those moments, but I have no idea. I am like, ‘Girl, you need help’.”
For listeners, streaks of familiarity can be found in the cool tones of her solemn vocals, which mirror the intimate self-examination of Nilüfer Yanya or the experimental impulses of FKA Twigs, while the music itself finds kinship in the organised chaos of Bon Iver’s earlier work. Yet she’s managed to create a discography with a singular DNA that often feels intangible, resisting algorithmic pressures to conform. “I feel very trapped when I get put down into an identity,” the 29-year-old shares. With ‘Saya’, though, the disorder that defined her previous work finally falls into some semblance of structure, revealing a “full reflection of a journey from one person to another”.
“I change like a chameleon. I change a lot, and I’ll continue changing”
Music has been a means of expression for Gray for as long as she can remember. She was born into a Christian household to a Japanese mother, a piano teacher, and a Scottish-Canadian father who was a trumpet player for music legends like Ella Fitzgerald and Aretha Franklin. Her brother and collaborator Lucian Gray is also musically gifted and attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music on scholarship. “We had music around all the time; it was constant,” she recalls. Gray learned piano, guitar, violin and bass, and started gigging around Toronto from as young as 13, at the same time mining inspiration in the rawness of her earliest CDs by John Coltrane, Nirvana and The Beatles.
By age 17, she was being offered gigs with pop stars and making money off her talent, relieving any pressure to explore alternative career paths. “I barely made it through high school, I can barely hold down a job, I’ve always been a complete outcast in society,” she shares with a self-deprecating laugh. But her musical talents pulled her into the right circles; you’ll spot her smiling in the background of several live Daniel Caesar performances posted to YouTube, including his 2018 ‘Tiny Desk’ concert.
“I’m grateful for the experience, but now I can put that towards my own,” she says. It was only a matter of time before she broke away to pursue her own ambitions, having struggled with the regimented nature of some opportunities: “If you force me to wear black and tie my hair up for that long, I might as well work at McDonald’s, right?”
While Gray was always making her own music in the background, she didn’t have much desire to release it, in part due to her revulsion towards celebrity. “Fame comes with great things. And it also comes with prison. It’s hard; everyone around you changes,” she says. But her musical peers and scores of industry folk continued to insist that she share her gifts with the world. “It became the natural progression. I was at that point where I was like, ‘Am I gonna just keep playing behind stars?’”
“Fame comes with great things – it also comes with prison”
She opaquely refers to those ensuing years in her early twenties as a “blur”, alluding to “tons of different label situations” and one particularly “tricky” set of circumstances just before the COVID-19 pandemic when she was prevented from putting music out. Now, she’s found a comfortable home at Dirty Hit, where they “don’t touch the art”.
‘Saya’ does indeed play like an album where her artistic intention is undiluted. Gray had spent three months travelling and road-tripping across Japan and California, having decided she needed to make a serious change in her life. “You know when you wake up and you’re just like ‘OK, enough’?” she recalls. “I was like, ‘I’m done with the chaos, done with the toxic and being in that nervous system frazzle state all the time’.” Mind, body and spirit aligned as Gray documented the “spectrum of emotion” she was going through among heartache, relationship reckonings and industry stresses. “I was really in touch with the grief cycle with this album,” she shares. “I was very cognisant of when I was angry versus sad, missing, scared.”
These are the very moments that punctuate the album. “You know there’s a puddle of me at your feet, isn’t that what you needed of me?” she asks between fidgety beats and steely strings on ‘Puddle (Of Me)’. The mournful ‘Line Back 22’, meanwhile, is an implicit “fuck you” to the one who’s wronged her before the intermission of ‘Cat’s Cradle’ quickly redirects back to the existential. “Since when has fame replaced great art?” she asks, a question Gray has spent a lot of time ruminating on.
“It’s really hard for me to start seeing how diluted the industry is now and how out of touch people are with who they actually are,” she muses. “It’s like people get pulled into this identity that’s closest to who they [think they] are, that the phone has manufactured them to be. And I think it’s really dangerous because it’s like we’re losing our spirit and ourselves.”
‘Saya’ is a folk road trip record at heart, its stacked guitars, weathered beats and chameleonic vocals echoing the vast landscapes the contemplative tracks were born in. With a guitar in the passenger seat and her voice memos app at the ready, Gray was intent on making a record with a heartbeat. “The digitisation of music has changed the frequency of a lot of music today,” she shares of her analogue approach, which meant eschewing digital effects in favour of physical gear like a Buchla synthesizer. “I wanted to make something that felt true to where I was coming from, an ode almost to real records.” Fittingly, closing song ‘Lie Down’ fades into a feedback loop of sound spun from old-school synth equipment, departing as a sonic “metaphor for the algorithm”.
Her reluctance to fit a mould, paired with an incorruptible commitment to her craft, has attracted a cult-like fanbase to her live shows in recent months. “Everyone was like the outcast that got brought out from the gutters of society,” she says protectively of a memorable London audience. “It was anime kids to old couples with VHS cameras. And then it’d be like a bunch of Instagram models and middle-aged men.” What this eclectic group of fans is taking away from her music, though, is currently unclear to Gray. “I’m like, ‘Why are you guys listening to this music? How weird are you?’”
Although she’s only just released her debut album, Gray insists – true to her ever-restless nature – she’s already transitioning into her next phase. She’s even hinted that her next ‘Qwerty’ instalment could be as left-field as a punk record. “I honestly feel like I’m just gonna keep coming back with ‘Qwerties’ that are fucking belligerent,” she teases. Time will only tell. “I’m just becoming more of an alpha state. I’m choosing what I want to see and what I want to do.”
Saya Gray’s debut album ‘Saya’ is out now via Dirty Hit.
Listen to Saya Gray’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Hollie Geraghty
Photography: Marisa Bazan
Styling: Ayumi Perry
Makeup: Sena Murahashi
Hair: Davey Matthews
Label: Dirty Hit
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