“Grace McLean [has] one of the most suggestive voices in North America today. Her sophisticated new [music] defies simple classifications, with more layers revealing themselves on repeated listens. Avant-garde pop…brilliant tracks.”
—Rolling Stone
With her music recently proclaimed by Rolling Stone as “Brilliant,” by The New York Times as “Phenomenal,” and by The Huffington Post as “Electrifying,” Grace McLean has found her moment. Her debut full-length album My Lovely Enemy is out May 10th on Meridian/ECR Music Group (Sony), following three single releases which have won her an international audience and press coverage on five continents.
“I’m so excited to share this album with the world because amazingly the world seems to be listening,” says the multi-hyphenate actor-singer-writer. “I love that people are connecting so deeply with these off-center pop songs about love and loss, because that’s what these songs are really about—they sit in and celebrate the moment of exquisite unknowing when change begins.”
An accomplished performer—currently on Broadway as President Woodrow Wilson in SUFFS—McLean’s songwriting has been praised as “Savvy” by Vulture, and “Musically complex, dramatically abstract and intensely intimate in style” by Broadway World. Stephen Holden of The New York Times writes, “Ms. McLean’s voice [is] a flexible instrument with unexpected reserves of power…behind her playful adventurousness lies a well of passion.”
Much like recording-artist contemporaries St. Vincent, Bjork, and Tune-Yards, McLean pursues both the visceral and intellectual on her new album. “I wrote many of these songs during the reconstruction era after a breakup and they contain the searching, yearning, and fervent meaning-making I found myself chasing during that time,” explains McLean. “These songs are a raucous wake for a love well lived, and a celebration of the barriers pain breaks down that we might rebuild better, and differently.”
Produced and recorded by musical polymath Justin Goldner, mixed by Jack DeBoe (Jean Baptiste, Tyler the Creator, Yebba) and mastered by Blake Morgan (Lenny Kravitz, Lesley Gore, Janita), My Lovely Enemy is out May 10th.
Grace McLean is a Writer In Residence at Lincoln Center Theater where her first original musical In The Green was commissioned and produced, received a 2020 Richard Rodgers Award, and a Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Musical. McLean was awarded Best Score from the Brooklyn Film Festival in 2021, and the Black Bear Award for Best Sound (Score) at the Athens International Film Festival in 2022. She has had two artistic ambassadorships with the US State Department touring Pakistan (2015) and Russia (2018), and her band performed in both the 2015 and 2016 Lincoln Center American Songbook series. She is a recipient of a Vivace Award for Musical Theater (2023), the Jonathan Larson Grant from the American Theater Wing (2021) and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ Emerging Artist Award (2017). Grace is one of Broadway Women’s Fund’s Women to Watch (2021), a member of The Civilians R&D Group (2019-2020), and a MacDowell Fellow (2018).
Connect with Grace McLean