Grace Davies - The Wrong Side of 25 (2025) (Hi-Res)

Grace Davies is here with her debut studio album The Wrong Side of 25, and I’ll say this, it’s one of the most introspective and deeply personal debut albums I’ve ever come across. The album sees Davies make a coming-of-age record that’s powerfully gripping and touches on so many of our daily insecurities that its relatability is guaranteed. If, like Áine Deane, you’re 20-something and pondering the reason why you’re trying to win a race you don’t remember running, you might find answers in this beautifully introspective Davies debut. Or you might come out with more questions than you did going in.

The album opens with “Welcome To the Wrong Side” – an instrumental that serves to set the mood for what we’ll meet down the record. Not that there’s any general mood for this project; Davies bounces from joy to pain to love to loss to dream and hopes and to growth. If I were to describe the British singer-songwriter’s mindset in creating this record, I would say she treated the record like a canvas, where she painted out a great many vivid emotions; sometimes one at a time, and sometimes all muddled together. But that’s the beauty of the whole thing, if you ask me. We often feel a lot of small different things that, in general, we really can’t decipher how we even feel at all.

These thoughts start coming in at “Youngest That I’ll Ever Be,” where she sings about shedding more and more of her youth with each age that she passes. “Like losing weight would sort me out / I’vе dyed my hair then cut it off / I’ve playеd the pop star that I’m not / I’ve tried hard not to hate myself / Some things in life you just can’t help,” she sings in the chorus. Change is the inevitable part of growth, so it was deeply relatable to hear her immortalize the reality in these lines, “Such a far cry away from seventeen / That girl I knew got lost somewhere somehow.”

In the following track “Super Love Me,” Davies shifts from self-reflection and critiquing for a second to talk about being let down by a lover she thought “super loved me.” In the seventh track, “A Wonderful, Boring Normal Life,” Davies insists she doesn’t want the glitz and glam of bright lights and dramatic moments; a “wonderful, boring normal life” is what she craves. More than just being a song about love, Davies revealed that the song “saved me from giving up and reminded me why I love, so very much, what I do. When life gets stressful and you feel like you’ve lost your sense of direction, you find yourself craving the mundane and ordinary.”

The closing track “25” reads like the diary of someone very unprepared to face a new age. In the hook, she sings, “’Cause life has a funny way to make sure you learn that / The more you desire, oh, the less you deserve / And I’m just try’na get by slow and steady / But someone blew my birthday candles out and I wasn’t ready.” She goes on to dissect the things that are causing her some mental and emotional distress, singing, “This life ain’t a computer game, thеre ain’t no control / One day time’s on your side then you’ve missed half the show / And now I’m on the way out of my twenties / Got so many birthday candles that my lungs feel heavy.” Baby Queen would finally immortalize this disturbing age in her album Quarter Life Crisis.

The Wrong Side of 25 is a record about a human being’s journey to meeting and accepting every age. The bulk of it is the inevitability of it all. You can’t stop aging simply because you’ve chosen not to accept it. And you can’t go back in time. The Wrong Side of 25 is what it feels like to stumble, lose, and find your way through 25, as someone who’s never been and, come 365 days, will never be that age again.

Nmesoma Okechukwu

Tracklist
1. Welcome To The Wrong Side (0:56)
2. Youngest That I'll Ever Be (3:24)
3. Super Love Me (4:26)
4. Do Or Die (3:00)
5. Hotel Delilah (4:25)
6. Lonely Long Enough (4:21)
7. A Wonderful, Boring, Normal Life (3:24)
8. Butterflies (3:56)
9. Another Night (3:40)
10. Nothing's Forever, Baby (1:03)
11. Look How You've Grown (2:29)
12. MDE (4:48)
13. I Hope I Never Live To Love Again (3:54)
14. It's Mean When You Don't Mean It (4:09)
15. 25 (4:49)