GET TO KNOW: GRACE CARTER

Nearly a decade since she broke onto the scene, Grace Carter announces her highly anticipated debut album When Saturn Returns. Inspiration, finally alleviated from the intense impasses of creative inertia, has at last repossessed the singer’s brilliance, amounting to a “raw, timeless, earthy and authentic” new release. Challenged by her therapist to find a piece of material that felt to touch what she wanted her music to feel to hear - it was but a light green strand of linen that Carter used to lace her heavy boots and ornament the final steps of the long journey leading to this record. When Saturn Returns is exemplary of an artist’s ability to reshape their strife into beauty, where the ruffled path to success may, at times, have frayed at its frills. 

Despite early success and tours with the likes of Dua Lipa and Jorja Smith just months after her debut single in 2017, Carter reveals how, “the early stages of my career made me unwell for some time, hence why I haven’t released much music up until now”. Moving from a small seaside town to London summoned a sense of soul-searching in its own right, irrespective of the spotlights that dazzled the uprooted teenager: “I was so young and vulnerable, I was singing songs about my biggest traumas everyday with very little emotional support, so it definitively took its toll”. And, whilst “something that always felt beautiful was the artists community”, the songwriter’s struggles and her peers’ affinities ought to remind us of the dangers of overloading young musicians in this industry. 

Yet, with the release of ‘White’ at the turn of summer - the lead single from When Saturn Returns - it is evident that the singer has sprung and blossomed amidst newfound relief. The song distorts her naturally gifted vocals, a brave and unprecedented choice that invites experimentation throughout both sides of the record, flipping forecast assumptions and mirroring a new side to Grace Carter. “I love white” she relays, “I feel like the reason behind releasing it first was to start with a blank canvas, to reset people’s expectations of what my music was going to sound like after years of not really getting anything new from me”. Written after the end of a seven-year relationship, the single is sentimental in typical Carter fashion, symbolising her reemergence in 2026, grappling with the weights of pressure and existentialism, all the while remaining playful: “that’s been the beautiful thing about making all of the songs, we were really just having fun and pushing ourselves with every song we made”.

It’s inspiring to see Carter reclaim her voice, after years of using her songs to provide solace for fans. When Saturn Returns orbits themes of womanhood, or as Grace denotes, “an album by girls for girls”. Citing collaborator Em as an essential element of its medley, between the two, “every song started with a conversation”. From Nina Simone to Alicia Keys, Grace’s mother provided the taste and soundtrack to her childhood steps towards songwriting; Carter has always asserted the impact of strong women throughout her career, the strongest of all perennially providing a maternal reassurance of confident support and reminder to stand tall against adversity. Hence for Grace, “This album is just me working through my shit”, knowing that “I should love myself a little more”. When asked why she gravitated towards the astrological title, she replied, “I’m just a girl who, like everyone else, is going through their Saturn Return”, specifically, in the “turbulent, challenging, uncomfortable but formative” period of one’s late twenties. Finding comfort in the sounds of SZA, Solange, Rachel Chinouriri and Yseult, she merely hopes to do the same for others, candidly revealing, “I have found peace, so I wanted my album to be that for anyone who needs it. We’re all learning for the first time, and it can feel so lonely”. 

Music has always been a way for Carter to express her purest and most intimate emotions, to process trauma and allow fans to find succor in the nooks of her lyrical sensitivities. Paired with fame, however, she noticed such become saturated, dissolving her pain into disposable debris for press material, tragically indistinguishable from the songs that portrayed a larger picture of her life. Feeling defined by the feelings she was initially hoping to move through, and plagued for years after with writer’s block, Grace describes, “I hadn’t ever given myself the time to explore any other part of me”. However, with green linen comes a redemptive arc and a rekindled spark that lights up When Saturn Returns - “Everything I have been through up to this point has happened in order to get me to this place when I feel so in control of myself and what I’m creating”. An impromptu escape to Stockholm last year saw optimism overcome Carter’s creative outlets once more, and now, “everything is different from what it was like”. She summarises, “I have had a really nasty ride through this industry, so to be in a position where this level of inspiration even managed to reach me is a massive win”. “This feels like the start” for Grace, and it arrives with thirteen stellar songs that will surely satiate the appetite of an awaiting audience that has stuck with her throughout. 

Once lost, now found, a reinstilled enthusiasm traces Grace Carter’s recent studio sessions and debut drop. Without overthinking, new sounds and experimentations are sprinkled throughout a track list grounded in “nothing but authenticity”. And she hopes that, “when people finally hear it, they will feel that too. It became what it was with no pressure or expectation”. She’s certainly “feeling really excited about it all and just happy music is finally going to be out in the world”, closing, “I need to just continue trusting my own instinct”. Hopefully, the astronomical heights reached by When Saturn Returns can only uplift future releases and perhaps even an upcoming tour. More imminently however, listen to Grace Carter’s latest single ‘Rather You Leave’, out today, ahead of the full album release on October 16^th.