Debut EP -
'Showing signs of strong emotion' - 2026
Who is Maddie Grace?
Maddie Grace is an emerging artist based in london. Her music resists easy categorisation sitting somewhere between intimate singer-songwriter and cinematic indie pop, with a sound that draws comparisons to Gracie Abrams and Olivia Rodrigo in its emotional honesty, Taylor Swift in its storytelling and Imogen Heap in its complexity and melodic timbre. Her voice carries an angelic, evocative quality, think the control and tone of Ariana Grande applied to something far more raw and personal reminent of her pop rock musical education. Her catalogue spans themes of obsession, betrayal, teen trauma, unrequited love, and identity, songs that feel as at home in a television drama or film score as they do on a streaming playlist. Everything she has built has been done entirely independently, without management or a formal team, driven purely by a relentless work ethic and an unshakeable belief in the music she is making.
Backstory
London-born and raised in the Kent countryside, Maddie Grace crafts music that resists easy categorisation, sitting somewhere between intimate singer-songwriter and cinematic pop, with a sound that draws comparisons to Gracie Abrams and Olivia Rodrigo in its emotional honesty, Taylor Swift in its storytelling precision, and Imogen Heap in its atmospheric, soundscape-driven production. Her voice carries an angelic, almost classical quality, think the control and tone of Ariana Grande applied to something far more raw and personal.
Raised by a drummer dad with a deep love for classic rock and pop legends like Billy Joel and Phil Collins, Maddie grew up surrounded by rhythm, melody, and storytelling. She was self-teaching piano and making music in her bedroom by her early teens, experimenting with composition before adding lyrics. Her journey began in primary school choir, writing songs in a little notebook, teaching herself to sing, and learning production on Logic X. She released her self-produced debut single to YouTube in 2022, moved to London and pushed herself into sessions and collaborations, using TikTok to test her songs and build a dedicated audience from scratch.
Already recognised by BBC Introducing and supported by Abbie McCarthy, her songs have reached Belgian radio, major Belgian TV, and a Disney sync in Belgium, all achieved without management or a formal team. She has performed at some of London's most respected venues including The Garage, Ronnie Scott's, and The Grace, alongside festival appearances at Hanwell Hootie in London and Chickenstock Festival in Kent, building a live reputation across the UK through support slots and headline appearances throughout 2025.
Her catalogue spans themes of obsession, betrayal, teen trauma, unrequited love, and identity, songs that feel as at home in a television drama or film score as they do on a streaming playlist.
Strip any of them back to their composition alone and they hold.
clever, quirky, and bright, her music also carries shadows, a quietly observed world of personal struggle and isolation. These contrasts give her work its emotional resonance. Her songs feel like the soundtrack to a coming-of-age film: cinematic, heartfelt, and unafraid to say what everyone else is only thinking. Not just catchy, cathartic.
Removing the platinum blonde for something more natural, At the end of 2025, Maddie Grace changed her hair, aligning with the big name change, and the era she was stepping into. In February 2026 she officially relaunched under the name Maddie Grace. 2026 marks the release of her debut EP, 'Showing Signs of Strong Emotion' a cohesive body of work that introduces who Maddie Grace always was as an artist.
The Bubble Army are not just a fanbase, they are an army, and Maddie Grace is their leader. Spanning the UK and Europe, with fans travelling as far as Belgium to attend intimate hangouts in person, they are one of the most quietly powerful communities in independent UK music right now. They share her music in schools, create fan-made books filled with personal messages for her, and place the bubble emoji in their social media handles as a mark of belonging — a quiet signal that says: I found her, and I'm staying. Maddie Grace genuinely knows and cares about each and every one of them, and they feel it. That depth of connection is rare. It turns listeners into advocates, advocates into family, and family into an army that fights for their artist in real time. Comparisons have been drawn to Taylor Swift's Swifties — fierce, loyal, deeply invested in the journey. The Bubble Army have been there from the very beginning, growing alongside Maddie Grace from scratch. This is not a manufactured fanbase. It is earned. And it is only getting started.
5 track EP tracklist:
Tracklist — Showing Signs of Strong Emotion
Let Me Fall — released March 2026
Amelie — released June 2026
Didn't Do It — coming August 2026
I'm Sorry — coming 2026
Annabeth — coming 2026
Showing Signs of Strong Emotion is a coming-of-age EP that explores what it means to feel everything deeply — especially when it comes to love, identity, and growing up. Each song captures a different moment where emotion becomes impossible to hide — from the excitement of falling for someone for the first time, to insecurity, imagination, longing, and ultimately betrayal. Rather than telling one linear story, the EP moves through five distinct emotional experiences that all reflect the same truth: feeling too much, thinking too much, and caring too deeply. It is a snapshot of what it means to be young, self-aware, and navigating the world with your heart completely open.
Let me fall - Song 1: Release date, March 27th
Let Me Fall arrives as both an introduction and a statement. The first chapter of Showing Signs of Strong Emotion signals an evolution from her 2025 project into something more defined, more fearless, and more fully herself, setting the tone for an EP that is large in its messaging and unafraid to say exactly what it means.
The song captures the self-sabotage and intense thrill of liking someone for the first time. The hypothetical scenarios built in her head, the giddy rush of falling for someone, and the insecurity around all the intimacy that comes with it. She feels like she is going to fall but keeps getting in her own way, begging herself and the universe to just let it happen. Hopeful and optimistic, childlike in its honesty, pretending to hate someone when she secretly loves them.
Drawing comparisons to her favourite artists, Taylor Swift in its storytelling precision, Gracie Abrams in its emotional intimacy, and Imogen Heap in its atmospheric, soundscape-driven production, you can hear a musical upbringing that was always leading somewhere. But what emerges is entirely her own. Maddie Grace's voice moves from a warm low register to soaring high notes, underpinned by lush instrumentation that reflects a real sense of musicianship. Catchy, melodically complex, and deeply connective, this is an artist who was always going to sound like this. It just took the right song to prove it.
Amelie - song 2:
Released June 12th
The second song shifts the perspective outward. Where Let Me Fall is inward and devotional, Amelie is observational, written from the edge of the room, watching someone who seems to take up all the space. It was the song the Bubble Army fell in love with first. At the 2026 Next Era Zoom parties, fans were asked to write their favourite song in their notebooks. Amelie came up more times than any other, and that response made the decision clear. This song would get a music video.
Rooted in a real experience from her college years, the song is named after the meanest girl she ever knew, but it speaks to something universal. Every school, every college, every university has an Amelie. The girl who seems to have it all figured out, who commands attention, collects invitations, and cuts deeply. The one who made others feel invisible simply by existing so loudly. The song raises the outsider perspective, the keen observers, the ones watching from the edge, never quite getting the memo on how to be normal. Amelie explores that experience without self-pity. It is sharp, honest, and deeply felt.
But by the bridge, the song softens into empathy. Years later, she realised the Amelie she knew was probably struggling with her own things too, hiding her own truths behind the performance of perfection. Not everyone gets to be Amelie. And even Amelie is just trying to survive what she is carrying
.
Maddie Grace had the vision for the music video the moment she wrote the chorus, pouring coffee in 2023, the melody arriving fully formed before the rest of the song existed. Always starting from piano and acoustic guitar and building outward, the production ebbs and flows between intimate and commanding, grounded and soaring. Electric guitar and live drums drive the track forward with repeating melodic riffs, big moments crashing into quieter ones. Her vocals are at their most evocative, fragile and expressive, layered harmonies woven throughout, the repeated melodic riff of Amelie across each chorus becoming something almost hypnotic. Musically dense, cinematic, and always meant to be heard.
Didnt do it - Song: Release date: August 2026
The third song is where the fairytale begins, and ends. Connected thematically to both Let Me Fall and the remaining two songs still to come, Didn't Do It sits at the centre of the EP's emotional arc, the moment where hope collides with reality and reality wins. It is perhaps the most visceral example of what showing signs of strong emotion actually looks like, living so deeply inside a feeling that the fantasy becomes more real than the truth.
The song is about retreating into fairytale fantasy to survive the disappointment of a situationship that never became what she needed it to be. Disappointment, imagination, delusion, hopefulness, living more in her head than in her life. The castle was always more real than the actual relationship was. She thinks something is going to happen in the back of that car. It doesn't. A relationship gone cold, and the quiet devastation of realising the version of events she had built in her mind was always more vivid than anything that actually happened.
Drawing on the imagery of fairytale princesses, Rapunzel in her tower, Cinderella not invited to the ball, the song frames heartbreak through the lens of the stories she grew up with. The production reflects that world, cinematic, lush, and dreamlike, before crashing back into the reality of waking up alone.
What the song does to the listener is immediate and disarming. The verses open with Maddie Grace's remarkably low vocal register, catching you completely off guard. A tone that is entirely her own, with a real depth that stops you in your tracks. She was once told by a teacher that you wouldn't expect a voice like that to come out of a girl that looks like her, and you hear exactly what they meant the moment the song begins. The melody is instantly catchy despite being rooted in something deeply complex, major sounding chord progressions carrying the weight of a much darker story, showcasing her ability to write songs that feel joyful on the surface and devastating underneath.
The chorus sits high, a deliberate choice, and you can hear her mixed voice and falsetto textures open up remarkably at the top of her range. Not comparable to the power of Ariana Grande but rather drawing comparison to that same sense of a voice that simply opens up at the top in a way that surprises you every time. The wordy, lyric filled chorus is a recurring signature across the EP, chords changing on "fast forward and I wake up at home, big flash and I wake up alone," so much songwriting craft packed into a single moment.
And then there is the bridge, Maddie Grace's favourite bridge of any song she has ever written. It pulls away the painting to reveal a completely different perspective, shifting gears in everything you thought you understood about the story. A moment of calm and emotional self reconciliation, with the ultimate word play weaving the Disney theme through the song's final emotional turn. The Little Mermaid reference lands quietly and devastatingly, "wanna be part of your world cos I'm still that little girl, who would close her eyes and see Disney movies in her dreams", before the fantasy overwhelms her one final time. The bridge ends on "Disney movies in my dreams, and when I close my eyes, all I see is" and leads straight back into the chorus. The moment the main character finally wakes up.
The remaining two songs, I'm Sorry and Annabeth, are to follow across 2026.
I'm Sorry — Song 4
Release date to be confirmed.
Within the EP: Where Didn't Do It is about how the love ends, I'm Sorry is about how it begins. The moment just before everything becomes real. Connected thematically to Let Me Fall, Didn't Do It, and Annabeth, together these songs trace the full arc of a relationship, from the first thrill of falling, to the friendship that became something more, to the back of a car where something should have happened but didn't, to the morning everything fell apart. I'm Sorry sits at the heart of that story, the beginning of it all.
The songs are not a linear story. They are five separate moments, five different shapes that strong emotion takes. What connects them is not the person but the feeling. Showing Signs of Strong Emotion is what happens when you feel everything too deeply and can't hide it.
About the song: Falling for someone after being friends first. Waiting for your best friend to finally see you the way he sees you. Desperately wanting to be on the same emotional page with someone. The real inspiration came from him saying "I'm really close to loving you, you have no idea how close I am." The response was simple. You either do or you don't. There's no close to. It's black or white. Playful, sarcastic, urgent, the song builds through the friendship and arrives at that excruciating moment just before he finally confesses. A love song from a completely different angle.
This song was posted to YouTube in 2024, a stripped back piano performance filmed in her living room, and it received 20,000 views. That moment confirmed what she already felt. This song was important. And it needed to be on the EP.
The sound: Written on the piano and built outward, I'm Sorry is intentionally summery and organic, piano, guitar, and vocals at the forefront. The chorus is deliberately understated, low energy for a pop song, because the concept demanded it. The "oh I'm sorry, go and tell your mommy" hook needed to land on the ground level, direct, dry, deadpan. The power comes later.
The bridge, "why can't we just read from the same page," acts as a post chorus, extending the emotional arc and catapulting the song into an entirely new space. This is where Maddie Grace's vocal harmonies take centre stage, rich, commanding, layered, and completely unexpected. The song strips back down at the end to just piano, guitar, and vocal, bookending exactly where it began.
Drawing comparisons to Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams, and Imogen Heap, the chord progressions are designed to carry the listener the way a film score does, every change communicating exactly what the lyric is saying. Melodically complex, emotionally intelligent, and quietly one of the most surprising songs on the EP.
Annabeth — Song 4
Release date to be confirmed.
Annabeth is Maddie Grace at her most raw and most powerful. Piano-led, building outward, lush instrumentation ebbing and flowing between intimate and commanding. The melodic power in this song is intense and immediate, the chorus hits every single time, catchy and commanding in equal measure.
The verses are where the lyrical detail shines most. Lines like "I didn't cheat, I didn't lie, I paid my tickets right on time, made my bed perfectly right, but what did you do with Annabeth last night?" paint a picture of someone trying to maintain order and perfection in their life whilst everything falls apart around them. It is a song for people with a perfection mindset, the ones who do everything right and still get blindsided. The rhyme scheme is intricate and deliberate, reflective of a poem turned into a song. Detail orientated, precise, and deeply felt.
Her vocals carry the full weight of the story, controlled in the verses, soaring in the chorus, and completely exposed in the bridge. This is one of the most poetic deliveries Maddie Grace has ever given, and it showcases the evolution and growth from where she began.
Annabeth is also a window into what songwriting has always been for Maddie Grace, not therapy by design, but catharsis by nature. She never set out to write songs to process trauma. She set out to write songs because she always knew she needed her own music to be the kind of artist she wanted to be. But somewhere along the way she discovered that writing about the things that happen in her life, the joy, the envy, the disappointment, the betrayal, always leaves her lighter than before. Annabeth is the purest example of that. Written in real time, on the morning everything changed, it is a song that sounds exactly like what it is. The chapter that closes the book. And the moment that made the whole EP inevitable.
A Closing Note
Showing Signs of Strong Emotion is the debut EP from one of the UK's most compelling new independent voices. With no prior industry connections and no team behind her, Maddie Grace has built everything you are reading about entirely off her own back The fanbase, the releases, the live reputation, the press, the community. All of it. Herself.
That is not a footnote. That is the story.
What makes it even more remarkable is that four years ago, she had never written a song. She had always sung. She had always paid close attention to music, analysing songs she heard on the radio, collecting melodies in her head, always aware that she wanted something more. But she had never written. And then she did. Her third song ever written was Changes, which connected with thousands of people online almost immediately. Her fourth was Treat Me Right, known affectionately as the Bubble Song, which sparked the fanbase that still stands with her today. The community, the momentum, the identity, all of it traces back to those first few songs.
She has spent four years since then writing, performing, learning, and showing up, driven by nothing more than a deep belief in the music and a determination to build a career on her own terms. The Bubble Army found her before the press did. The songs connected before the campaigns did. And now, with five chapters of one of the most emotionally honest EPs of 2026 rolling out across the year, it feels less like a question of whether the industry will take notice and more like a question of when.
Maddie Grace is an artist at an inflection point. A team will find her. Until then, she is doing just fine on her own.
For press enquiries, streaming links, and interview requests:
Email: maddiemcphersonmusic@gmail.com
Landing page including all social links and Showing Signs of Strong Emotion EP tracks: Maddie Grace Press Page