Back from his stellar, sold-out first ever Headline tour through Europe, up-and-coming UK singer-songwriter Tom Gregory kickstarts the next chapter this month with his debut offering for new label Sony Music: “Forget Somebody” is an irresistible uptempo anthem and the first tune off his yet-untitled third full-length. Listen here.
“My dream has always been playing on big festival stages around the world, but then all my success came during Covid, so I had no chance to play the songs live,” says the 26-year-old songwriter from Northern England who released “two albums during the pandemic – a very strange thing to say,” yet managed to land massive hits including “Fingertips,” “Never Let Me Down,” (w/ VIZE), “River,” and “Footprints” along the way.
With 770+m global streams already under his belt, not to mention huge radio hits in major European markets including Germany and France, the Blackpool-born musician has spent the better part of last year in Los Angeles to work on songs that are going to define his forthcoming third full-length offering. “It’s going in a direction that I always wanted to end up in,” he says about the new single “Forget Somebody,” a surprisingly fast-paced track “about trying to move on,” as Tom puts it.
“I would say it’s sad uptempo. It’s not a happy record at all,” he says about the new single that incorporates 80s-flavoured guitars and also nods to his Indie Rock influences. “One thing I learned from playing live and touring is that people love to dance around and to get freaky with uptempo songs. After being gone for a while, I wanted to come out with something that wasn’t a midtempo song. I wanted to make people move.”
“I think you always come to that point in a break-up – when you leave somebody or someone else breaks up with you – where one person moves on, and the other person doesn’t,” he says about the feeling that inspired the new single. “With this song, we wanted to find a way of capturing the struggle of moving on from somebody. Trying to move on in a world with Social Media can be so hard – and I think that’s something a lot of people can relate to.”
Speaking about the forthcoming album he’s currently working on, Tom Gregory wants to create “something that I feel could exist in two different worlds – both on a festival stage and on Pop Radio. I think they are two really difficult things to achieve, separately, but together it’s even harder. Having achieved the radio part with a couple of my earlier songs, I wanted to show that I’m someone who can also exist on an Indie Rock/Pop festival stage – and this new music is me making that transition,” says the young musician whose inspirations range from The Killers and Kings of Leon to Britpop classics and even P!NK (“She’s a rockstar.”).
“I definitely want my music to have as much of a rock/pop edge as possible.” – Tom Gregory
Although he’s been a mainstay across European Pop Radio for years, Tom Gregory actually took a couple of detours to get to where he is today: A rather shy teenager, it was his dad who signed him up to audition for The Voice UK when he was 16 – only to get “knocked back: no one turned around for me,” he says about live audition round in London. Back home in Northern England and fighting with early bouts of depression, he was soon looking for a new outlet, and eventually nicked an acoustic guitar from his school’s music supplies. He tried playing with a band, but that didn’t work, he signed up for a course in music production, and ditched it after just one week to take on a role in BBC series The A Word – yet, “unfortunately, I hated acting!” Starting to work on solo material, he eventually found the right songwriting partners – and used that stolen guitar from his former school to write future hits like “Fingertips”…
With multiple radio #1s under his belt across Europe, Blackpool-born singer and songwriter Tom Gregory has been one of the UK’s biggest exports since the release of his debut single “Run To You” (currently 30+m Spotify) in 2017. His 2020 single “Fingertips” (148m) instantly hit the #1 spot in Germany (airplay) and was certified Gold (Germany) and Platinum (France) across Europe. Hooking up with German production duo VIZE, ‘Never Let Me Down’ (currently 246m+!) immediately went Platinum in Germany, hitting top-10 spots in the Austrian and German sales charts. Following his official debut full-length Heaven In A World So Cold (2020), he returned in 2021 with sophomore release Things I Can’t Say Out Loud – an album that featured multiple hit singles including “River” (68m; #4 airplay GER; top-15 annual German Radio Charts) and airplay smash “Footprints” (40m).
