Grown Up Girl Regrets confirms Lily Moore is ready for much bigger rooms

Lily Moore has made my favourite release of the year so far. Grown Up Girl Regrets is only five tracks long, but there is more personality, humour, ache and sheer vocal presence packed into it than most albums manage at twice the length.

There has always been something instantly recognisable about Lily’s voice, a dusky richness that can move from a near-whisper into something huge without losing its humanity. Across Grown Up Girl Regrets, that voice meets sharper pop production, flashes of soul and a cheeky lyrical streak that occasionally brings Amy Winehouse to mind without ever reducing Lily to somebody else’s reference point.

Five songs, no wasted space

Lily Moore opens with ‘Thinkin’ Bout It’, and within seconds the EP knows exactly what it wants to be. Desire has moved into her head without asking permission, then apparently made itself comfortable enough to stay, and Lily plays the whole thing with a mixture of lust, disbelief and barely concealed amusement.

It is an absurdly good opener. The production gives those dusky vocals all the space they need, while the writing keeps edging closer to the point where self-control politely gives up and leaves the room. By the time Lily is questioning her own values while admitting precisely how badly she wants somebody, resistance seems fairly pointless for everyone involved.

‘Float’ is where the swooning becomes unavoidable. The central image is beautifully simple: Lily has built enough protection around herself to stay safe, but safety has started looking suspiciously like another kind of trap. Learning to float means allowing some of that control to go, with love presented as something capable of completely wrecking your carefully arranged life and perhaps being worth it anyway.

The song gets some of its best moments from the contrast between fear and appetite. Lily wants to run down Oxford Street screaming, let people stare and finally sit at the table with everything she has spent time avoiding. There is liberation in it, but not the neat, inspirational kind. She sounds like somebody who knows letting go could make an enormous mess and has reached the point where the mess sounds appealing.

Then comes ‘Castles In The Sky’, and this is where Grown Up Girl Regrets goes from excellent to ridiculous. It has rocketed straight into my personal top five songs of all time, which is not something I expected to be writing when I pressed play. Lily’s vocals are gorgeous, the melody is almost offensively good, and the whole song finds that elusive point where something can feel instantly accessible without sounding anonymous.

The imagery is brilliant too. Success is there in champagne, high heels, travel and ambition, yet the rooms Lily has built have nobody staying in them. The title becomes both aspiration and warning, with the castle representing everything she is trying to create while loneliness keeps echoing around the empty space inside it.

There is something devastating about hearing Lily ask whether she has gone too far on her own while the melody keeps pulling upwards. It looks glamorous from a distance and hurts once you get there, which gives ‘Castles In The Sky’ a tension that makes repeated listens almost compulsory. This feels like Lily’s biggest pop song so far without sanding away any of the character that makes her worth caring about.

The title track arrives fourth, and we have already written about ‘Grown Up Girl Regrets’ on its own. Inside the EP it lands even harder. Its exhaustion, loneliness and need for change now sit between the ambition of ‘Castles In The Sky’ and the reckless release still to come, making the song feel like the point where the whole project briefly sits down and admits it has had enough.

Its best trick remains the way adult frustration becomes both serious and slightly funny. Lily can ask for hope, trust, love and a reason to stay, then throw “a little more sex” into the same list without breaking the mood. That balance is all over this EP: she can hurt without becoming humourless and joke without hiding what the joke is protecting.

‘Feeling All The Feels’ closes things by taking every bottled-up instinct and kicking the lid off. Funerals, weddings, fights, bad decisions, reckless driving and a lifetime spent wanting to be liked all come crashing together in a song about wanting to experience something fully, even if what arrives hurts.

Lily’s range across the track is staggering. The voice that could sound smoky and conspiratorial on ‘Thinkin’ Bout It’ now stretches into something far more exposed, with the arrangement giving her room to move between provocation and something much sadder. Beneath all the outrageous imagery is somebody tired of holding herself back and desperate to know what it would feel like to stop.

That is the thread connecting all five songs. Grown Up Girl Regrets keeps returning to the space between control and surrender: wanting somebody, letting yourself love, chasing ambition, admitting loneliness, feeling everything instead of behaving nicely enough to keep everybody comfortable.

And Lily makes it all sound effortless when it plainly is not. She has the kind of vocals that can dominate a song without flattening it, but the writing is every bit as important. The cheeky turns, little flashes of self-awareness and refusal to make adulthood look tidy are what stop these songs becoming exercises in vocal showmanship.

She is also increasingly difficult to imagine remaining at this level of visibility for long. Lily is rightfully finding a growing audience, and Grown Up Girl Regrets sounds like the release that should push that growth much further. The voice is there, the songs are there and, crucially, the personality is all over them.

I should probably give up pretending there is any distance left between reviewer and record at this point. I am deeply and truly in love with Lily for creating this EP. Not in some cool, detached critic sense either: I mean the ridiculous kind of affection you feel when an artist makes something that seems designed to hit every part of your brain at once, then somehow makes you want to hug them for having the nerve to put it into the world.

It probably does not help that Lily also appears to be an absolutely wonderful human, and her Instagram coffee reviews have become one of those tiny pleasures that make following her even more fun. The combination of that warmth with songs this sharp, funny and bruised makes her frighteningly easy to root for. By now I am deeply in love with the EP, completely charmed by Lily and accepting that impartiality packed its bags several tracks ago.

Grown Up Girl Regrets Review

Grown Up Girl Regrets is stunning because every song earns its place. ‘Thinkin’ Bout It’ flirts, ‘Float’ loosens its grip, ‘Castles In The Sky’ reaches for something enormous, the title track admits how tiring adulthood can become, and ‘Feeling All The Feels’ ends by ripping through whatever restraint is left. Through all of it, Lily’s powerhouse vocals remain the obvious headline attraction, yet the EP would not land this deeply without the wit, melody and precision underneath them.

I genuinely cannot remember another release this year that has hit me this immediately. ‘Castles In The Sky’ alone would have been enough to make me evangelical, but surrounded by four songs this strong it becomes part of something even better. Lily Moore should be a massive star, and I suspect she will be. Until then, I am absurdly grateful she made Grown Up Girl Regrets, slightly overwhelmed by how much I love it and delighted to be here while the rooms are still small enough to remember everybody who fell for her before the doors burst open.