At just 19, Folk-pop artist Alyssa Grace arrives with spilling my guts, a debut EP that makes a compelling case for her as a songwriter while revealing an artist still finding the edges of her identity.
There is a vulnerability to Grace’s writing that makes the project easy to connect with: her songs are intimate without being overly precious, moving between metaphor and blunt emotional detail that feels distinctly of its generation. Her voice can soothe as easily as it can quake with longing and anger, giving the EP an emotional immediacy that has already resonated with her growing audience.
That songwriting instinct is most apparent on “bones”, which opens the EP. Over piano, swelling cello and understated acoustic guitar, Grace describes the desperation of trying to make yourself worthy of someone else’s love, comparing the experience with being dug up from the grave.
It’s melodramatic in the way young heartbreak songs often are, but Grace has enough control over her writing to make the feeling land rather than feel fleeting. “dog with a bone” similarly strips back the production to focus on the ugliness of a toxic relationship, while “picking petals” finds a warmer, more lush arrangement without losing that emotional resonance.
“bloodstream” is perhaps the project’s clearest demonstration of Grace’s ability to turn that resonance into something widely accessible. The song confronts the internal struggle of moving through emotional trauma, and its mainstream success suggests that Grace has found a particularly effective language for translating private turmoil into communal catharsis. It’s a testament to Grace’s ability to close the gap between feeling something in real time and writing in a song.
Where spilling my guts is less assured is beyond the songwriting. Grace’s musical and visual identity still feels closely tied to the current wave of confessional young pop, and there are moments where her vocal delivery and performance bring other artists to mind. That isn’t necessarily a weakness. Influence is inevitable, particularly for an artist this green, but it does mean that Grace sounds like an artist who knows what she wants to say before she has completely worked out how she wants to say it. But this feels less like a problem than a particularly interesting place to start.
The EP’s final track, “baby swim”, featuring Andrew Lucier, hints at the breadth Grace could eventually explore if she pushes beyond the familiar contours of current confessional pop. The songwriting is already there; what remains is discovering how much of herself she can put around it. If Grace can take the next step and perform her songs in a way that feels unmistakably her own, spilling my guts may prove to be the first glimpse of a much more compelling artist in the making.
