Ally Salort

Maplewood, lessons at seven, covers at fifteen

Salort grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, and started music lessons at the age of seven after watching her older brother perform. She was 22 when she sat down to talk through her second EP in 2026, which places the whole of her recorded career inside her early twenties. At 14 she reached the final of a label talent search that took her to Los Angeles, an early near-miss rather than a breakthrough.

The actual route in was the internet. From the age of 15 she posted covers to YouTube and TikTok, and those videos accumulated tens of millions of views — enough traction that the industry came to her rather than the other way round. Her catalogue of covers ranges across genres, but she has described the move into original writing as a gradual one, and settled on what she calls singer-songwriter organic pop because it keeps the lyric at the front of the arrangement.

'Stranger Things', a label, and the streaming years

Her first original single, 'Stranger Things', came out in May 2022. The next two years were spent building a streaming base one song at a time rather than chasing an album: by 2024, tracks including 'Deeper Meaning' and 'Messy' had run into the millions of Spotify streams.

The deal followed the numbers. Her signing to Disruptor Records, through RCA and Sony Music, was announced on 10 June 2024, with And Music handling management. The copyright line on her releases reads Disruptor Records/RCA Records under exclusive licence from Salort LLC — the masters sit inside her own company and are licensed out, which is a structure that tends to be negotiated by artists who arrive with an audience already attached.

Two EPs, eleven months apart

The debut EP, 'Change of Plans', was released on 18 July 2025. Its best-known track, 'Horror Movie', had been teased online more than a year before it appeared, and its reception surprised her. Another song on the record, 'Tattoos', started as a guitar-and-vocal sketch and was rebuilt into a full pop production — an arrangement she has said took time to come round to.

The second EP, 'Isn't it sweeter?', followed on 26 June 2026: six tracks, eighteen minutes. Four of them had already been issued as singles — 'I've Never Met Her', 'Finish Line', 'Proof' and 'Housekeeping', the last of those arriving in mid-May 2026 — leaving 'A Little More Fun' and 'I Wish We Had Forever' as the new material. Salort has framed the record around distance: the idea that a person can be a long way from home and still circling the same thought or the same person, and that wherever they go they remain themselves. Escapism, she has said, drove the visual side of the project.

Her working method starts at the outside and moves in. She prefers to begin with a title and a metaphor and write towards it, usually with a co-writer in the room; recurring collaborators include Victoria Zaro, who records as RYANN, David Charles Fischer and GRACIE. The songs come out of personal experience or a single turned-over idea rather than from topline sessions built on a track.

A season of arenas

Austin City Limits in October 2025 was the hinge. It was her festival debut and her first performance in Texas, and it coincided with the first headline shows and first tour dates of her career. She has said she expected almost nobody to turn up and found an audience that knew the words.

Seven months later she was opening arenas. Charlie Puth's Whatever's Clever! World Tour — his first to play arenas and stadiums — ran its North American leg from 22 April to 13 June 2026 across 34 shows, and Salort took the opening slot on a run of them that her own camp counted as 29 dates. The confirmed stops include San Diego on 22 April, the Kia Forum in Los Angeles on 29 April, Madison Square Garden on 29 May, the Etess Arena in Atlantic City on 30 May and Houston on 13 June. Daniel Seavey and Lawrence shared support duties on various nights. Setlist.fm logs 38 documented Salort performances in total, across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Austria.

Reviews of the arena run were consistent about the same two things: the voice carried in rooms far bigger than anything she had played before, and the audience engaged faster than an unknown opener usually manages. At the Maverik Center in Salt Lake City on 9 May she wore a black sparkling dress and the arena answered 'Deeper Meaning' with phone torches, an effect her label's Nicole Garcia described as warm and present in the room. At MGM Music Hall at Fenway in Boston on 22 May the same thing happened by her fourth song; the reviewer noted she was new to venues that size and did not play like it, and that the covers in the set connected as strongly as the originals.

Autumn 2026: back down to club size

The current run is a step down in capacity and, probably, up in exposure per head. Salort is listed as support on Lexi Jayde's Lover Girl Tour, announced in early September 2026, which opens in Philadelphia on 18 October and finishes at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles on 3 November. Four of those dates are the ones currently on sale with her name on the bill: Philadelphia on 18 October, the Bowery Ballroom in New York on 20 October, The Atlantis in Washington, DC on 21 October and the Mod Club in Toronto on 26 October.

It is the second support tour of the year and the first in rooms where a quiet song can be heard properly. Nothing has been announced about a headline tour of her own behind 'Isn't it sweeter?', and no third EP or debut album has been confirmed.