David Gray’s story is unlike any other. He spent almost a decade striving to make a breakthrough, and when it happened it did so in the biggest way imaginable as White Ladder became one of the best-selling British albums of recent decades and established him as an arena-filling artist. As the years have passed, his songcraft has only been deepened by his natural ability to convey specific emotions, atmospheres or, as heard on his acclaimed 2021 album Skellig, a perception of place - all positioning him in the lineage of classic poetic singer-songwriters rather than lovestruck acoustic troubadours. While the likes of Ed Sheeran, Adele and Hozier have acknowledged his influence, David has continued to follow his own artistic path.

Now, his next chapter comes with the release of his new album Dear Life on January 17, 2025, through Gray’s own independent label Laugh A Minute Records, in partnership with Secretly Distribution, which is quite possibly the deepest, strangest and loveliest set of his career to date. He launches the album alongside its lead single Plus & Minus and unveils plans for a forty-one-date world tour, entitled the Past & Present Tour.

Dear Life is Gray’s thirteenth album. An album of emotional crisis and resolution, mortality and faith, reality and illusion, love and heartbreak, magic, science, loss and acceptance. While it is full of yearning and hope, there is an undercurrent of darkness, a tension between competing forces of hope and despair: a cavalcade of emotions in what is his most lyrically-focused collection to-date.

Plus & Minus is David at his most immediately infectious. The song’s piano refrain frames a duet about a fractured relationship, in which his inimitable voice trades words of disillusionment and despair with newcomer Talia Rae, whose smoky vocal simultaneously evokes equal measures of wit and sadness.

Gray is a songwriter’s songwriter, one of those rare artists who can express themselves as fully through lyrics as through melody, a richly poetic wordsmith with vast musical flair. Dear Life is a big statement, the work of a driven man obsessively focussed on a personal artistic journey.