A Little Louder, Please (Deluxe)

For Rose Gray, the club has always represented freedom. “If you’re going to the right places, all inhibitions are dropped and no one cares what you do,” the East London-born singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “There’s something primal about lots of people in a room listening to heavy drums.” Gray would know. Ever since her late teens, she’s spent every available moment immersed in nightlife, building a community of go-go dancers, promoters and DJs who not only love clubbing but respect it, too. The music she makes is similarly reverent: scooping into the vast melting pot of dance music, she welds together everything from Screamadelica-inspired acid house, delectable nu-disco, subterranean future garage and psychedelic trance. “I think there’s a real bond with anyone that makes dance music that means you’re allowed to take and borrow sounds and melodies and it’s celebrated,” she says. With this debut album, though, Gray set out to refine a sound that felt her own. Inspired by pop icons such as Kylie Minogue, Robyn and Ray of Light-era Madonna, she recruited some best-in-biz collaborators, including songwriting master Justin Tranter, who signed Gray to their publishing house, Sega Bodega, Sam Homaee, Zhone, Sur Back, Uffie and Alex Metric. The result is Louder, Please, a euphoric and chest-achingly candid distillation of British club culture and turn-of-the-millennium pop. “I had to really grab that sound by the horns,” Gray says. “I think this record is the most pop out of anything that I’ve done. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m ready to do this.’” The album title itself is another representation of Gray’s personality. “I’ve probably grown up being dangerously obsessed with loud music,” she says. “But the ‘please’ at the end is very me. I’m quite maximalist and I can be brash, but I will always be polite, which I think feels like some of the record. It’s heavy, but there’s a sweetness to it.” Read on as Gray takes us through some key tracks on this deluxe edition, which