For JGrrey, identity has never been a fixed thing. It exists somewhere between perception and reality of who people think she is, who she sees herself as, and the person she has become in between. Across a decade of making music, the South-London artist has built a world for outsiders, loners and, in her own words, “cutesy little weirdo freaks”— people navigating identity, belonging and the often messy process of understanding themselves.
With her long-awaited debut album, You, Me, and Jen, JGrrey turns that exploration inward. Tracing the experiences that have informed her journey so far, the record reflects on identity, family, belonging and artist she is today. Alongside her latest single, ‘Bedbug’, the album reveals the many facets of JGrrey. From the meaning behind tracks like ‘Pedigrree’ and ‘Take My Hand’ to her journey through music, visual identity and the community surrounding her work, we caught up with JGrrey to talk about the many sides of Jen.
Are you a coffee, tea or matcha girl?
I’m a tea girl. Yorkshire tea bags always!
All time favourite movie?
I’d say maybe my favourite film is American Psycho. And I’m watching Invincible right now. Seth Rogen’s a producer on it and it’s got some gnarly voice actors on it. It’s really cool.
If your life were a movie, how would you tell the story? How would you want your audience to know your journey and what title will you give it?
It would be narrated by me, like a POV, through my eyes, from when I was a kid until now. It’d be a crazy long film, and it would be called You, Me, and Jen.
And yeah, it would be about my journey. I’ve been doing music for 10 years, and before I started doing music, I didn’t really know what I was gonna do and I didn’t really have any plans. I found myself moving around a lot as a kid because I grew up in the care system when I was younger. Then, when I was adopted, my parents ended up moving around a lot because I think they were trying to find a good place for us to grow up. So we ended up moving around quite a lot, and I think, through that, I learned a lot about other people. I also learned a lot about the ways in which I can be perceived by other people.
So, a lot of my life, or a lot of my internal narrative, is about me understanding how I’m being perceived by people. And that obviously influences everything I do, the spaces I take up, my friendships, and stuff like that.
You mentioned the idea of being perceived. How has that shaped your identity so far?
It’s shaped my identity and made me aware that my surroundings and what I take in can change how I perceive myself or my identity. I can see somebody else doing something and get inspired to become like that person.
I remember when I was a teenager, I’d see people skateboarding, and I was like, “I want to be a skateboarder.” Then I’d see people with tattoos, and I’d be like, “I want to be somebody with tattoos.” My identity has always been shaped by the people around me—by being perceived, perceiving other people, and observing other people. And I think that has made me a very easygoing and flexible person. I meet people where they are at, in the hopes that they meet me where I’m at too. And I think I can talk to anybody, anywhere, about anything, and I quite like that.
So when did you start making music?
I started about 10 years ago, maybe longer. Longer, probably. I uploaded a song on Tumblr. I uploaded a song—a shit, bad song—to Tumblr, and then Manga Saint Hilare from Roll Deep, he’s like my family, he reached out to me and said, “Oh, come to the studio.” And so I went to the studio, and that’s when the music thing really started for me. Because after that time in the studio, I made a song with Manga, and I knew I didn’t like it. That made me want to give it another go and see if I could do better. And then after that everything started. I performed for COLORS Berlin and I’d never even released any music before that. I had one song on SoundCloud and then after the COLORS Berlin performance, people just started telling me I was a singer, so that’s what I did.
I feel tattoos are such a big part of one’s journey. Can you walk me through your tattoos?
The first one I got was when I was 14, in Arizona, in America. So random. And ever since I got that first tattoo, I just didn’t stop. I’ve got these ones, which say “Fool the World,” which was kind of an accident. Then I was doing a music video for my song “Dreaming Fool”, and I told my friend Trap, “Let’s tattoo my hand.” And then I realised afterwards that if I did this, it reads “Fool the World”. And that’s also another one of my mantras, like nobody knows who you are, you can say anything and people will believe it. So this was kind of like a happy accident, “Fool the World”, but I also stand by that. A lot of my tattoos are just really silly, to be honest.
Feeling like an outsider is something a lot of people experience, especially when they’re trying to find where they belong. Your journey really speaks to that. How have you navigated those feelings throughout your music career?
Yeah, the outsider thing has just kind of been a part of my life. I think when you come into the world and you don’t really have a family, there’s this constant curiosity of other people’s family connections. Like, “Oh, that’s your mum and dad, that’s your cousin, that’s your sister,” and everyone kind of has their family. Or you know, conversations like, “Oh, you look just like your dad.” It’s such a common part of how people talk about themselves with their families and friends. It’s a recurring theme in conversation, and when you can’t relate to those experiences, you’re kind of built to feel a bit different. I can’t really have those conversations, so from the beginning, I think I always felt a little bit outside of everyone else’s situation.
So I, from the jump, felt a little bit different, or a little bit outside of everybody else’s situation, which I quite like now as a grown woman. I know my thing, I know my situation, I know who my friends are, and I know that I also don’t really need anybody, ever. I really do quite like that about myself. It’s helped me in that way. I could lose everything today and I’d be fine with it. I know I’m fine because I know this. Whereas I think other people maybe hold on to things a little bit more.
What keeps you grounded and motivated to keep going?
I struggle to stay motivated, to be honest, but I stay grounded by staying off the internet and minding my business, I would say. I try my best to stay off the internet and not look at what everyone else is doing, and I’d rather just stay at home, look after my cat, mind my business.
Tell me a bit about your album you me and Jen, and why this title?
You, Me, and Jen is based on, or rather, inspired by perception. I think as soon as somebody reads the word “you” and hears it in their internal monologue, they feel like they’re being addressed. And so, I quite like the idea of somebody seeing that and feeling addressed, feeling like it’s potentially for them or about them.
And then again, the idea of “you” and “me” has been a recurring theme in my life, whether that’s through being in different foster homes, different relationships, or even just my idea of myself.
It seems to be like, being perceived is one thing, and then that’s a version of you. But how I perceive myself and my internal monologue, that’s the real me. And then “Jen” is maybe the person you’re meeting now. I’m “Jen”, but maybe you can find parts of what I’m saying and realise that you’re actually resonating with some of it. So maybe there’s a bit of you in there. That’s why I called it You, Me, and Jen. Also my entire monologue is a bit of a battle. It’s either I’m talking to myself and I’m like, “You need to do this,” or it’s “I need to do this.” So it’s again, that perspective thing between “you” and “I”.
The album has been a long time coming, man. I’ve been trying to release this for a while. Obviously, it’s my debut album, and I think it’s cool and It means a lot to me. The things that I’m talking about in the album, again, are just true to my experience, in the hopes that other people can resonate with it.
“You don’t want me, you can’t raise a mixed brreed“, tell me about ‘Pedigrree’ and this line particularly. What was going through your mind while making this song?
When you’re in the care system, what happens is, when you’re a certain age you have these days – they’re like meet-and-greet days. So it’s you and maybe 30 other kids who are in the same assisted living system as you, and what you do is just go and play. So I’m over here, building something, playing, and then potential parents come and watch you. They’ll just come and observe, and it’s like, “Oh, that one looks nice,” or, “That one looks cool,” and that’s kind of part of the process.
And I remember as a kid and feeling like one day I’m gonna get picked and I’m gonna be chosen by someone one day. And I think for a long time, even as a kid, I was aware that there are different things that can make you more desirable as a child or as a potential family member. Like, you know, two white people come in with blonde hair and blue eyes, they probably want a child with blonde hair and blue eyes. If you’re adopting a kid you’ve got your preferences and that’s fine.
But for my whole life, I’ve been aware of feeling like I probably wasn’t the best option to be someone’s kid. Like, I wasn’t the best pick. And that’s maybe because I’m racially ambiguous. You know, someone might say, “Oh, well, she doesn’t really look like our kid.” Or when I was adopted, I didn’t know who my dad was, so people would ask, “Where’s she from?” And nobody knew. I didn’t have a clear class or race. And “Pedigrree” just talks to my experience of being a mixed-race person and people almost having these preconceived ideas of who I am. That’s what “PedigrRee” talks about, not only people’s preconceived ideas of me, but also the experience of feeling like I wasn’t good enough as a kid because I didn’t look a certain type of way.
And then the “mixed brreed” line has been a part of my whole life and my whole identity. People ask me, “Where are you from?”, “Oh, you look like you could be this,” or “You look like you could be that.” It’s been this continuous narrative throughout my whole life. And I know where I’m from now because I did an ancestry test. But before that, I really was just this “mixed girl”. And I think there can be preconceived notions about mixed people, people assuming we’re a certain type of way or not part of, say, a pure lineage. And sometimes people just don’t know how to handle that. So that’s why I said, “You can’t raise a mixed brreed,” because sometimes people just don’t know how to handle something they don’t understand.
Does your past experience affect your collaborations today at all and how you work with other people?
Definitely. I’m a creature of habit. The majority of the people I work with are people I’ve built relationships with over the past seven or eight years. Kadiata, who produced the song with M Huncho, I’ve known Cads for a long time. People like Owen Cutts and Humble the Great, I’ve known these people for a minute. And I’ve got to have that baseline trust and understanding with the people I’m working with. Sort of that stability around me.
Your Instagram feed has this black & white, kind of a grey aesthetic, which makes sense. I feel it’s quite poetic and reflects your emotions well that you convey in your songs. Tell me a bit about how you built your visual identity.
My visual identity is actually quite laid-back and quite easy to take in. I know throughout my career, I’ve kind of done a lot of different looks and a lot of different aesthetics, but actually, I think I feel most comfortable with some more laid-back, simpler styles. When I was 19, over 15 years ago, I had a different account. I’ve been many different people. I used to do comedy, and I had a different artist name. And now the grey aesthetic is like a very comfortable place for me. It’s in between black and white, so It’s like a grey-area thing. It’s again, like a happy accident. I kind of resonate with the colour grey.
Is there something you were hoping to understand by creating ‘Take My Hand’? It sounds like you are seeking some answers in the lyrics.
Yeah, definitely. I think it came from a place of intrigue. Like I said, I’ve met many different people through my experiences, and when I meet people, I can come off as quite an intense person. I’m the kind of person who wants to know everything about someone—where they’re from, what their family is like, and what their life was like growing up. I’m quite intense like that. And initially, when I started writing about that, it came from a place of nostalgic intrigue. I remember being a kid and, as I said before, seeing other people with their families, going to lunch with their cousins or talking about doing things with their uncles. I remember being curious about what that was like, because it was something I didn’t really have.
I’d ask people, “What’s it like going to family dinners or on family holidays?” Or they’d tell me, “We’re going up to my granddad’s house,” and I’d be like, “Tell me about that. What’s it like to know your granddad and see your family history?” I think the song came from wanting to explore the idea of that stability, a family unit or simply a secure, stable home.
And since that tune’s come out, people have resonated with it in that way. People who maybe don’t have secure family systems or don’t have the privilege of knowing their dad, or going on holidays with their dad, or whatever it is. I think people have resonated with that through “Take My Hand.” And it’s kind of a form of escapism, you know? Like, it’s alright we don’t have that, but take my hand, we could go somewhere. We could make our own unit, or we could make our own memories.
How was it working with Bel Cobain on this song?
Amazing! She is an absolute angel. She’s like an ethereal being, like not from this earth. I love her.
How would you describe your audience? Like, what kind of people do you think listen to you?
I think outsiders listen to my music. I think loners listen to my music, and people who struggle in their day-to-day lives. People who are learning about themselves often resonate with the things I’m saying, and I think people who are looking for community and want that sense of community also seem to tap into my music. But yeah, cutesy little weirdo freaks.
What can you tell us about ‘Bedbug’?
‘Bedbug’ is sort of a greasy, showy-off-y, stunty tune. It’s an affirming song for me. I think I try my best to be a humble and modest person, but “Bedbug” is almost the opposite of that. In the song I’m saying, “You’re not fly, you’re a bedbug.” I’m just showing off a bit and getting in my not-so-humble bag. Maths Time Joy, who produced that track, is an absolute king. The beat is fire. To even be on the same track as Erick the Architect feels like a real blessing. That’s crazy. Shout out to Erick as well. That’s my dog. I’m excited for people to hear that one because it’s nice. It’s a good tune.
So how does it feel now to be one of the UK’s most compelling alternative voices?
It’s a very nice thing to say, and I will take that. Thank you very much. I’m very happy to still be here. As I said, I’ve been making music for quite a while now, and it feels good to still be able to release music and being able to make my music alongside some really amazing musicians too. There’s some really cool new stuff coming out from all over the world that I’m always flabbergasted by. And yeah, it does feel good to still be in the conversation and to hear things like that.
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Words: Nandini Bhattacharya
Photography: Marco Grey, Yout Work
HMUA: Nic Marilyn