On 11 May 2021, a minor pop schism occurred. It was the first Brit awards in the pandemic, delayed a few months from the ceremony’s usual February date. That night, two young stars who made their names in lockdown had massive debuts: Olivia Rodrigo’s first-ever live performance, of “drivers license,” and the British pop songwriter Griff’s second ever, of the very Gotye-like “Black Hole.” Backstage, that year’s Global Icon winner Taylor Swift held court in her dressing room, inviting the two self-proclaimed Swifties to share chips and take goofy selfies.

Not two months later, it emerged that Swift had been awarded 50% of the writing credit for Rodrigo’s song “deja vu,” which had a faintly similar bridge to her song “Cruel Summer,” leading to an obvious distancing between the two. Meanwhile Swift has continued to shout out Griff and invited her to support a recent Eras date in London, praising her from the stage as “so creative on every single level.” What’s curious about the continued support, given the apparent reason for the estrangement of Swift and Rodrigo, is how profoundly indebted Griff’s debut album, Vertigo, is to Swift’s sound.

This year’s The Tortured Poets Department watered down the boom and sheen of Swift’s 2014 album 1989, which is further diluted by the eminently tasteful pop songs of Vertigo. The racing pulses never risk causing alarm. The bubbling synths would barely disturb the surface of any pond. The martial drums are more ceremonial than primed for battle. There’s a cavernous, momentous glow to the production that reminds me of how the 1989 portion of the Eras tour echoes around the stadium every night. The quieter songs, like “Into the Walls” and “Everlasting,” immediately evoke the tenderly plucked strings and twig-snap beats of Folklore and Evermore.

Obviously none of that suggests that Griff should be held liable for taking inspiration from a formative songwriting hero (she’s said her earliest musical memory is getting an iPod loaded with Fearless and playing it on repeat) or that creativity should be litigated that way. It’s just one aspect of how oddly derivative this long-gestating debut is. Tilt it this way and you hear the formal liturgies of London Grammar (soppy ballad “Astronaut,” piano courtesy of Chris Martin); that and the long tail of the excitement over 2010s Scandi pop that never really anointed any proper pop stars (the desperate, cathartic splash of the appealing “Miss Me Too” has Robyn in its DNA). Here’s a little MUNA (the gently punchy and ecstatic “Anything”); here’s quite a lot of the 1975 (the snapping “Hiding Alone,” the surprisingly loose dance breaks of “Cycles”).

Griff (born Sarah Griffiths) got her start by releasing music online and in 2019 quietly signed a deal with Warner in the midst of doing her final high school exams. She broke out in 2020 with “Good Stuff,” a piano ballad direct enough to connect during the pandemic when Instagram was the only way to perform for fans. When concerts became possible again, she supported Dua Lipa, Coldplay, and Ed Sheeran, all but skipping mid-tier venues. That night at the Brits three years ago, she won the Rising Star award, the weight of the British music industry behind her. Griff has never failed to hit her marks professionally. Her songs—which she also co-produces, and always has—also come with a distinct air of competency.

Nothing is off; Vertigo is very well-studied and primed to reach the rafters of the mega venues she was thrust into early on. It just lacks much sense of her in it, and for an album seemingly about being failed by a vanishing lover and named after the physical sensation that the world is lurching on its axis, it seems more focused on finding steadiness again than embodying those head-spinning feelings. Griff sings in a tone of rueful anguish about falling for what now appears to be an illusion; even the relatively riotous breakdown of the clattering, choral pop moment “Tears for Fun” processes her voice to mute the rage in it. The subtleties are very subtle: “Pillow in My Arms” is softly tweaky, Griff’s desperation blurred into a whirlwind; ominous serrated textures bite at the lonely “19th Hour,” where she sounds convincingly on her last nerve.

The frustratingly slick Vertigo speaks to two issues. First, how to translate pandemic pop stardom into the real thing—giving a promising, major-signed young artist the opportunity to work out her voice on her own terms, and adapt to a scale bigger than a phone screen but smaller than a stadium. And second, how entrenched the Scandinavian formalities of pop songwriting have become in the last 15 years. When the rigors of craft are well established, the artist’s personality becomes even more critical, and this summer’s reigning outlandish, cheeky, brash pop girls have illuminated and fed that hunger. For all that Griff has aced the industry’s rungs and garnered all the right plaudits, Vertigo can’t hope to compete with peers who have taken weirder routes to their breakout moments. Griff’s talents are so clear you suspect she could do this with her eyes closed; may she yet escape the industry tractor beam to take some shots in the dark.