"I felt defined by my trauma": Grace Carter details industry burnout and adult adolescence on new single "White"

"White" comes with a candid open letter to fans in which she describes feeling “defined by” childhood trauma during her initial rise to prominence.

In the letter, the 26-year-old reflects on entering the music industry at 17 and beginning to release music two years later. She worked independently before signing to a major label, but now says she had little sense of self outside the big emotions she was carrying. Her debut project, Why Her, Not Me, directly addressed growing up with an absent parent.

“Writing it was one of the most healing experiences of my life, but I wasn't prepared for what came afterwards,” Carter writes. “Every day, I was revisiting the hardest parts of my childhood, reliving them on stage, in interviews and in the studio. Without the emotional support I needed around me, I eventually stopped processing that sadness and instead felt like I was defined by it.”

The letter details a subsequent creative and emotional stall. Carter says she became scared to open up again, feeling that her early work had boxed her into a narrative of pain. Seeking a reset, she booked an impromptu flight to Stockholm last year. Away from label expectations and live commitments, she says she wrote freely for the first time in years: “Nobody was expecting anything from me. Nobody was putting pressure on me,” she explains. The resulting material, she adds, sounds different from her earlier output – less dark, more reflective, hopeful and optimistic.

“For years, I felt like my actual taste in music was never fully represented in what I was making,” Carter continues. “Because so much of my writing came from such emotional places, the sonics often felt secondary. With this new music, it was important that it felt like the records my girls and I genuinely love, whether that's SZA, Frank Ocean or Solange.”

"White" is the first chapter of this new phase. Written after the end of a seven-year relationship, the song addresses the pressure many young women feel to settle down before “time runs out”. Carter recorded parts of the vocal both sped up and slowed down “to mirror that feeling of being rushed through life”.

The letter frames the Stockholm sessions as an exploration of what she calls her “adult adolescence” – the messy, confusing and beautiful period in your twenties and thirties when the world no longer sees you as a child, even if part of you still feels like one.