“The truth is, for the last two years I’ve been writing songs about the same girl,” Isaac Gracie tells me, lounging on the sofa as he rolls up a cigarette. “It’s kind of sad actually, this EP will come out and it’ll be X amount of years since that situation came to a close and yet the EP might as well have her name on it.”
Breaking onto the scene in 2016 with his EP “Songs From My Bedroom”, the record was a strikingly intimate look into what the young songwriter was feeling following his first heartbreak. “I used to be an emotional person, so I was able to feel a lot of stuff and the idea of turning it into music almost came as a natural step,” Gracie explains. Pausing to take a drag on his cigarette, he laughs: “Nowadays I’m pretty numb.”
Now having released his new EP “The Death Of You And I” earlier this year, Gracie is moving away from heart wrenching acoustic songs and venturing into new territories. The eponymous lead single was released in August, and the track is a lot heavier than his previous material, with an earthshaking chorus driven out of a place of Gracie just wanting to scream something. “We tried to take it to the extent where there was a heavy aspect to it,” he tells me of his new sound. “It’s bigger than the bedroom recordings but it’s not shiny and false. It’s still real and you can see me in it, which I think is important.”
With an album in the pipeline for early next year, “Death of You And I” is shows another side of Gracie, proving his talent in crafting songs that can both make you cry and sing at the top of your lungs. “I just sit at the guitar for ages and write loads of shit. Like really, really bad songs, and I get drunk and spend a lot of time doing that and I feel like shit,” he describes, turning his head to look back out of the window again. “I spend a lot of my time feeling like shit and then sometimes something nice comes out. It isn’t pleasant but, you know, you have an EP by the end of it.”
Taken from the Autumn 17 Issue of Wonderland; out now and available to buy here.
See Isaac Gracie live on tour, including a show at Village Underground in January. More info available here.