Griff has been announced as the winner of this year’s BRITS Rising Star Award, after fending off competition from the likes of Pa Salieu and Rina Sawayama.
The 20-year-old, who was nominated for the prestigious honour earlier this month, now follows in the hallowed footsteps of other artists who have won the prize – including the likes of Adele, Celeste, Florence & The Machine, Sam Fender and Ellie Goulding.
“In my head I’m still screaming from the phone call when I found out,” Griff said of the honour.
“It’s honestly such a miracle: how on earth did we manage to win a BRIT and break through during a pandemic?”
Griff, who is originally from Hertfordshire, signed to Warner Records in 2019 and received initial acclaim with tracks such as ‘Black Hole’ – which saw her exploring the trickiest parts of teenage life such as mental health and family ties.
In an interview last year, NME described her as a “British pop phenomenon taking control of their destiny”.
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Describing the process of working on new music throughout the coronavirus lockdown, she said: “I feel like all I wanted, at the beginning of lockdown, was to have a season like this where I could just be all in and make.
“Now that I’m here it’s actually hard to be inspired by four walls. All the music that’s come out so far I wrote it in my spare time, outside of school, when I was just making stuff for the fun of it.
“Whereas now there’s more of a purpose and this has to be better than the rest of everything else. My tactic now is to just keep writing. I mean most songs maybe won’t be that good, but you just keep doing it and then there’s one that really sticks out.”
Griff will now appear at The BRITs ceremony, which takes place at London’s O2 Arena on Tuesday, May 11. It is set for broadcast on ITV and the ITV Hub.