Rose Gray has been starstruck a few times. There was the time she was at a Gucci show with Rihanna and ASAP Rocky (“I didn’t speak to them”). There was the time she sat next to Lady Gaga (“I didn’t speak to her — and I should have”). And then there was the time she met Madonna, at a party thrown to celebrate the singer’s 2023 arena tour.
Gray did speak to the queen of pop. “I got introduced to her and sort of curtsied,” she says. “I was really nervous — she has a powerful presence. It’s very warm, though.” Gray was in character. “We were told to come dressed as a Madonna era, so I dressed like when she lived in London and was with Guy Ritchie, and kept being papped in all Adidas with Kangol hats.” What did the guest of honour make of the cosplay? “I think Madonna got it,” she says. “And that’s all that matters.”
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Curled up in a booth in a pub in Kentish Town, northwest London, over a cup of tea, today Gray is off-duty and still looks ready to party in a bright orange jacket, jeans and Tabis, her dark red hair falling around her face. Party-ready is her brand: Gray’s 2025 album, Louder, Please is a taut 41 minutes of clever club-classic anthems and melancholic earworms with a beat that got her nominated for a Brits Critics’ Choice award this year. It was the IYKYK soundtrack to summer 2025 — though Gray, 29, spent much of it on tour with Kesha — hurtling across America on a tour bus (“a lot of partying, high energy, amazing”) — and the Sugababes. “Siobhán, we really connected,” she says. “I think it was the red hair.”
This summer she’s playing “16 or 17 festivals”. She is also about to set off around Europe and North America on her first headline tour. Things have really stepped up a gear. “Much faster, much less sleep. It’s great. I spent years not feeling like I was doing what I was meant to be doing.”
Louder, Please is her first album but Gray is no new kid on the block. When she was 17, three weeks into her first term at the Brit School — the pop star mill that has produced Raye, Olivia Dean and Lola Young — she auditioned for a record label and ultimately signed a deal. She spent three years writing music, only to release nothing — “I got to 20 and was like, what the hell is going on?” — so she called in the lawyers and got out of the deal. “I pushed music away for about two or three years. I didn’t like the way I was treated, and I just think I was so young that I needed space from it.”
This led to a few years doing odd jobs: as a teaching assistant, video role play for the NHS, and working the guest list and cloakroom at Fabric. “Really good memories there — finishing and being able to party,” she says, often with her best mates, a gang she met in the canteen on her first day at the Brit School. “I started to really need to go out,” she says. “It was really affecting me, not having a clear plan, so going out was my everything. I would plan weeks around where to go.” Best place she’s ever partied? “Berghain.”
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They might have felt like lost years at the time, but really it was all good material. Gray never stopped writing, and after she found new management she got back in the studio and made the album. “I never stopped making music,” she says, “which I think is a bit like, ‘Maybe you just have to do this.’”
Now she’s doing it all: touring, songwriting in Stockholm (“the pop music mecca”), still hitting dancefloors in east London — and turning out on the odd red carpet with her husband-to-be, the Babygirl actor Harris Dickinson, 29. They have been dating since school and got engaged last spring. The wedding is — politely — off limits, although in April they had what, from Instagram, appeared to be a joint “sten do” at a big old mansion. Gray wore a white bodysuit by Di Petsa (complete with a white garter), Dickinson some smart tailoring, and their guests — who included the musician Gracie Abrams — dressed as fairies for a weekend of DIY DJ sets and dancing. One Instagram slide shows a poster for something called Club Misty, which was surely in honour of Misty Blue, the couple’s British shorthair cat with a blue steel stare. Did she have a sten do? “People don’t know if it’s a big party that I had,” she says, faux coy. Well, what was it? “It was a celebration of love. There were a lot of couples there — it could have been for one of the 20 couples there, to be fair.” Uh huh. “It was very fun,” she giggles. “Very, very fun.”
Rose Gray with her fiancé, Harris Dickinson; and performing in Michigan in July 2025, supporting Kesha Scott Legato, Swan Gallet/WWD via Getty Images
When she and Dickinson — currently filming his role as John Lennon in the Sam Mendes Beatles films, alongside Paul Mescal, who plays Paul McCartney — are not celebrating, they are wandering up the canal in east London to the pub. “We just love to chill, not being together that much,” she says. They cope fine with the itinerant lifestyles of pop star and actor. “Honestly, it’s all I know. And I think it really works — we’ve both got our own little worlds going on and sometimes they entwine, but mostly we’re doing our own thing and it really works not always being in the same place at the same time.”
Dickinson has directed two of her videos: 2019’s Blue and 2023’s Afraid of Nothing (which at one point features a runaway bride hurtling through the streets of London). What was it like to collaborate? “I love it — and I also think we will again as well. Now we’ve both grown as artists and creatives, I think it will happen. We really do learn a lot from each other’s industries — film and music are very different.”
Their relationship has evolved as their careers have. “I feel like we’ve done really well,” she says. “I’m so proud of how we’ve grown and I’m so proud of him. We’re just having a really good time. It feels like a really good year for both of us.”
Born Rosie May Hudson-Edmonds, she grew up “on the border of Highams Park and Walthamstow”. (Dickinson is from Highams Park.) Her parents were jobbing actors who juggled other jobs — her dad as a builder, her mum office jobs — and she was “a proper tomboy. Very, very curly hair, climbed trees, always broke my bones.” She played striker for the local football team Interwood and got scouted by Tottenham. “It freaked me out so much that I never went to the trial — I didn’t think I was good enough.”
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Her first exposure to pop was the Now… CDs (join the club), which evolved into a full-blown teenage obsession with Robyn. (Gray saw her Sexistential show at the Hackney Empire in March: “It blew my mind.”)
Sixteen months after her first big album, Gray is getting to grips with the pop star lifestyle. Red carpets are fine now she has glam — “when I was younger I was getting changed in a pub toilet” — and touring is an adventure. “I love it. Waking up in a new city every other day — when would you do that unless you’re on your gap year?” (Her rider includes Haribo, good coffee, ginger shots and orange wine, which she swapped in for hard seltzers: “A bit chicer.”) The best gig she has played so far was in Rio last November: “A headline slot at 2.30am. It was wild. And the crowd were insane.”
An exciting 2026 continues, which she’ll cap off by turning 30 on New Year’s Eve. “I think about Sex and the City — they were 35 when that was filming, and they were goals. Sat in the slickest, chicest New York restaurants, smoking cigarettes. So I’ve got another six years to peak.”
In a world where women are pop’s dominant cultural force — headlining festivals, writing the music to accompany our heartbreaks and hedonism — she’ll do it easily. “There’s a vulnerability a lot of women have with the way we write, the way we can see the world and make art with it,” she says. “I feel like it’s a very good year for the girls.”
Rose Gray’s single Club to Your Arms is out this summer
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