Grace Enger

“The story of my life has been telling myself I can’t do it, but then still doing it, and ‘it’ working out way better than I thought,” says singer-songwriter Grace Enger. The 23-year-old has built a career on that paradox, and on songs that make others feel less lost in their own contradictions. Blending pop, folk, soul, and rock, she crafts songs that approach what she calls “stereotypically shameful emotions” — resentment, insecurity, the taboo of a forbidden crush — with the no-filter intimacy and levity of a heart-to-heart between besties. “I feel like I’m writing songs that I needed to hear when I was younger,” she says, “and maybe that I still need to hear now.”

Enger’s Your Favorite Record EP is full of songs you might need to hear, too. Early single “Give A Little” is a bright, piano-driven bop with forceful guitar strums and horn flourishes. It’s also the kiss-off you wish you’d given an emotionally deadbeat ex, while the wistful “Running Back To You” explains why you can’t stop texting that dud back. Later, the floating “Track 7” trades tough love for self-acceptance: “Well maybe I’m a deep cut / But aren’t those the best ones? / Ones that stick with you forever ever?” By the end, “Falling For You Anyways” sees her opening up again to new experiences. “This project represents a metamorphosis,” Enger says, “my journey of growing up and realizing I don’t have to stick around in situations that don’t serve me.”

It’s an arc that mirrors its creative process. Written in the months after her first headline tour in 2025 (she was back in the studio that Monday), the EP captures a “liminal” headspace, caught between the afterglow of achieving a dream and the anxiety of what comes next. Her support system gone, Enger faced a choice: wait for someone else to make things happen, or do it herself. She chose the latter, stepping into production work she’d always left to others and making demos of new songs — not voice memos, but expansive arrangements with harmonies and strings. “I was telling myself I couldn’t do things alone. You give yourself all the reasons why you shouldn’t: ‘girls don't produce,’ ‘you should leave it to a guy,’ ‘you need a creative director,’” she says. “But by the end of it, I took the reins on my own project and therefore my own life.”

Enger also wanted Your Favorite Record to feel like the soundtrack of her childhood, listening to John Mayer, Sara Bareilles, Norah Jones, Stevie Wonder — everything her parents would put on in the morning car ride to school in Hoboken, New Jersey. She fell in love with songwriting at age 10 thanks to Taylor Swift’s Red. She was soon penning her own tunes, eventually attending Berklee College of Music’s teen summer program, where she was selected from a thousand applicants to play the institute’s esteemed annual student singer-songwriter showcase.

Enger began making trips to Brooklyn to collaborate with friends at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute. Two years later, she enrolled. Pandemic-era online courses freed up time, so she began writing with classmates Sadie Jean and David Alexander, posting everything they made to TikTok. In 2021, a clip of her “19 and Lonely,” about never having been in a relationship and hating it, went viral. Months later, a song she co-wrote, Jean’s RIAA Gold-certified “WYD Now?”, exploded.

Riding that momentum, Enger hit the road, opening for Alexander 23’s tour shortly before releasing her debut single in 2022. “I had only ever played three shows in my life,” she says, “but it was like, ‘Just grab the parachute and jump.’ I walked onstage; me and a guitar in front of 2,000 people in Salt Lake City. You learn on the fly.” The following year, while touring with Maisie Peters, she released her first EP, Well Here We Are, a collection of acoustic ballads about the growing pains of young adulthood, from the hometown heartbreak of “The Neighborhood” to feeling uncertain about the future in “20.” Her 2024 follow-up, The Alchemist EP, dug into a deeper side of her songwriting. Written during a bout of depression and anxiety, and influenced by the darker alt-rock textures of Fiona Apple and Radiohead, songs like “Habits Die Hard” and “A Year From Now” showed a broken heart in the process of spinning its pain into beauty.

Enger sees Your Favorite Record as a “part two”: older, wiser, and more hopeful. “The girl who wrote The Alchemist thought she was healed and moved on, but hadn’t actually taken action,” she admits. “I was just self-soothing and telling myself that, whereas this version of me is a bit braver.” The sound reflects that evolution with a theatricality drawn from the musicals she grew up on, and with bigger instrumentation — live horns and piano layered with key changes and “weird chords.” Which brings her back to where she started: doing the thing she told herself she couldn’t do, and finding out it worked out better than she thought. “I hope people can see how passionate I am about it,” she says, “because I really eat, breathe, sleep, and shit this stuff.”