EQ Music hit the Big Apple last week for New York’s most manic music festival – the CMJ Music Marathon, and boy did we have a packed dance card. Running back and forth between the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, CMJ took over hundreds of venues in the city each packed with back to back artists trying to impress.
Our first stop took us to see 18 year old Grace Mitchell at Williamsburg’s Brooklyn Bowl. Signed to Republic/Island, Grace launched herself on Soundcloud a couple of years ago and gained fans with a confident cover of Hall & Oates ‘Maneater’ on the soundtrack to film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
Everything went up a notch though this summer with a Zane Lowe ‘World Record’ premiere in August and all the hype that ensued. Tonight she arrives in New York as the last night part of a support tour with Joywave and kicks off her set with that ‘World Record’ – the mesmerising ‘Jitter’. Taken from the Raceday EP, it feels like a pop song that breaks the traditional structure rules combining a stuttering introduction, a low swung verse, a rap, a sugary sweet chorus and the best bit of French we’ve heard in a song since Cheryl’s ‘Promise This’.
Further highlights include the 80s pop rock of perky ‘shutting down romance’ anthem ‘NoLo’, written with Foster & The People’s Mark Foster and the bratty “we live the DJ life, we go out every night” chorus of ‘Breaking Hearts’.
Casual in a baseball shirt and jeans, you get the feeling watching Grace that this a young artist who feels totally comfortable with her journey so far and poised for big things with the force of a major behind her as part of Republic’s ‘Class of 2016’.