EXCLUSIVE: Gretta Ray on Positive Spin, Maisie Peters and reinvention

Sitting in the glow of south coast sun and sipping on an iced coffee in an indie Hove coffee shop, Gretta Ray is radiating summer the day after making her The Great Escape debut.

That vibe has very much been the 26-year-old’s mantra over the past 12 months, taking her brilliant sophomore record Positive Spin across the globe. An hour of sun-kissed synth-pop, the album sees the Australian embrace adulthood with an endearing breeziness.

“I’m really proud of it,” Gretta admits. “It was born out of a place of such genuine joy.

“A lot of the songs for the album I wrote in London during the summer of 2022 and it was this perfect bubble of time. I hadn’t started thinking of things in terms of a campaign and stuff so the creativity was the only thing fuelling me. To quote the lyric, I really was soaking it up.

“By the time we got to Australia to record it, it was summertime too. There was so much brightness surrounding the creation of this record. We worked hard on making the album as polished as we could.”

Ray has been releasing music since 2016 but her popularity in the UK has skyrocketed in recent months after supporting Maisie Peters on tour. In those short sets, first-time listeners couldn’t help but be taken by tracks such as ‘Heartbreak Baby’ and ‘Don’t Date The Teenager’.

That project came to life on Monday at Lafayette with 600 fans in front of her but it’s a different feel to the star’s set at One Church in Brighton.

“The show [on Thursday] was really good,” Gretta says. “There were some fans there, it was a different vibe from the headline show but it was nice to think of the songs differently almost as if pitching the project, it’s a good creative challenge.

“Playing in any church-like venue is really beautiful because of the acoustics. At my headline shows now there is a sense that the audience is part of the show, which I love, but on smaller things like this it’s taking it back to basics and the original world it came from. I love both.”

It’s impossible not to talk more about Ray’s role in last year’s Maisie Peters headline tour. That stint of shows were critically acclaimed as Peters became the talk of the music world as it came to a close at Wembley Stadium.

The support slot for Ray was a real winner – at Lafayette a quick poll confirms the majority of the audience first met the star on the road in 2023.

“I think there’s a really beautiful story between Maisie and I,” Gretta explains when asked why those sets worked quite so well. “I think that’s something the fans are in on, because we’ve shared it with them.

“Whether that’s me doing backing vocals on Maisie’s songs or her on mine, or me jumping up as a guest on her first Australian shows ever, there have been little things that have fuelled it. She’s one of my closest friends. Getting to be a part of her ever-growing, incredible story, I’m very honoured.”

Over a year on from dropping Positive Spin, the songwriter is beginning to think of her next era and reinvention. She recently debuted the vulnerable ‘January is Quiet’ at a live show as a hint of the music she’s currently making.

“I completely forgot before I got on stage that I hadn’t sung it before,” she laughs when talking through the choice to close her Lafayette set on that track. “It felt more vulnerable when I realised.

“I love that song so much but it’s really interesting to play it off the back of that record. ‘January is Quiet’ wouldn’t exist without the experience of the album over the last year. It was something I was drawn to writing on my own in Melbourne.”

The thought of new music will excite fans, whether they have met the singer on tour with Maisie Peters, at The Great Escape or years ago in Australia. However, patience may be a virtue as she continues cooking up what’s next.

“The song [‘January is Quiet’] says ‘I’m unsure of what is next’ and I’m really still on that page. Something I want to do more of is spend time with me and my guitar again. The confessional songwriting that happens when you’re on your own is different to co-writing.

“All I know is that I love equally this pop stuff I’ve been doing as well as me and my guitar. I’ve spent the last couple of years really trying to get that pop stuff right, now that we’re at a place where I feel really comfortable with it, I want to keep embracing that.

“I’ve gotten really into RAYE. I’m so inspired by her and validated by how she can move across five genres in one night and it’s all RAYE. We can get very in our heads as artists with genres, I want to break out of that and do something that is just me.”

Are you a Gretta Ray fan? Let us know @CelebMix on X.

ncG1vNJzZmiblaGyo7nIsWWcp51ksrmvy66qoq6VYrSzsdOtmGaqka56sLqMqaasoaSew6Z50qmgp2Wdlra0tcRmp56slafAbq3NnWSrnZmjw6a606Kmp2c%3D