Hannah Grae

Hannah Grae is a Welsh rock musician from Port Talbot. Several of her works have gone viral online, and she released a mini-album, Hell Is a Teenage Girl, in April 2023. She is a member of Loud LDN.

Life and career

Early life

Grae was born in Port Talbot, and has a brother. Her parents worked as a drama teacher and in the film industry. Growing up, she was a fan of Hannah Montana, having first developed interest through a shared given name, and found her double life as a schoolgirl by day and a popstar by night aspirational; from her, she became a fan of Taylor Swift. She later became a fan of Justin Bieber when she was ten. She was inspired to make her own music after watching an episode of Friends in which Phoebe Buffay wrote a song; her first work was a song called "The Chicken Song", and her first works were acoustic piano-based songs.

She later took over her father's studio; in a September 2023 interview with Rolling Stone, she stated that her father had built it in her garden seven years earlier, that it started off as his office but turned into a Ninjutsu studio, and that they had to soundproof it after her brother's band took over the cabin and Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council complained. She later diversified into rock-based cover versions and reworkings, such as a version of Olivia Rodrigo's "Drivers License" from the perspective of her ex-boyfriend's new partner. In 2021, she uploaded an anti-sexual harassment parody of Aqua's "Barbie Girl" to YouTube and TikTok, which went viral on both platforms, with commenters treating the comments section as a safe space and sharing their own stories of abuse; moved by the response, she began composing original songs.

Hell Is a Teenage Girl and Nothing Lasts Forever

Grae's debut single, released in September 2022, was "Propaganda", a song about the pressures of social media. In November, she released "Time of Your Life", a song about adolescent issues, alongside a video filmed in a Port Talbot comprehensive school. She then released the singles "I Never Say No" and "Hell Is a Teenage Girl", the latter of which took its name from a line in Jennifer's Body (2009), and then in April 2023, she released "Jaded", an attempt at writing about feelings of inferiority in relationships; all five singles appeared on her mini-album Hell Is a Teenage Girl, which she released later that month, and intended as a riposte to her bullies. After she finished writing Hell Is a Teenage Girl, she took a five-month break, during which time she moved to London, doing so in January 2022; she resumed writing as a way of distracting herself from external pressures.

Her next single, "Screw Loose", was released on 25 August 2023, and was written about feelings of confusion in her new surroundings; the following day, she and Nieve Ella performed at Reading Festival. In September 2023, she then released "It Could've Been You", a pop-punk record about heartbreak which had previously been teased on TikTok and gone viral, and which NME likened to Blink-182's "All the Small Things" with lyrics "similar to Paramore’s "Misery Business"; a music video was filmed at The George Tavern, and was released in October 2023. For Halloween, she released "Who Dunnit?", an experimental song about not being taken seriously accompanied by a music video, and in December 2023, she appeared on Dork's Hype List. She announced her second mini-album, Nothing Lasts Forever, in February 2024, and released "Better Now You're Gone" at the same time, releasing the mini-album the month after. In May 2024, she released "New Temptation", which she wrote towards the end of writing Nothing Lasts Forever, and "Aeroplane Jelly".

Artistry

Hell Is a Teenage Girl was inspired by Paramore, My Chemical Romance, Queen, and Taylor Swift. In an interview with The Line of Best Fit in September 2023, Grae cited the honesty of Alanis Morissette as a "huge influence"; the piece also noted that Grae's music was "littered with female influences, from Swift’s songwriting sentimentalities and melodic prowess to the energy of No Doubt" [sic], and sported "a powerful vocal dexterity that, at its highest reaches, carries echoes of [...] Hayley Williams and [...] Demi Lovato". When writing "It Could've Been You", she referenced Bowling for Soup, Green Day, Paramore, American Hi-Fi, Avril Lavigne, Mean Girls and Shrek, and when writing "Who Dunnit?", she was initially inspired by "Heart of Glass" by Blondie. For some of her songs, she writes as her influences, imagining what Swift or Morissette would write about a particular topic. She is a member of Loud LDN, a collective of London-based women and genderqueer musicians founded in May 2022.

References