Emi Grace

Skate videos, a violin, and the wrong instrument

Emi Grace was raised in Southern California and works out of Los Angeles. She traces the whole thing back to skateboarding: in an interview published on 26 May 2025 she said she grew up skating and fell in love with rock and punk through skate videos. That is a fairly precise origin story for the music she now makes, which tends to treat a riff as the load-bearing part of a song rather than the decoration.

She describes herself as a guitarist, producer, songwriter and vocalist, in roughly that order, and the influences she names — Tom Morello, No Doubt, Van Halen — point at two different instincts that her records keep trying to hold together: the effects-pedal noise-making of the first, the pop discipline of the second.

Her first real audience came from Trashy Tone Thursday, a recurring series in which she plays guitar solos over dance beats. It is a social-media format rather than a body of work, but it explains a lot about how her songs are built, and it got her written up in Guitar World before she had an EP out. Ahead of that she worked the Los Angeles circuit — School Night, the Troubadour — and took opening slots for Fitz & The Tantrums, Winnetka Bowling League, The Kills and K.Flay.

The pivot, April 2025

Grace had been making pop and dance music. On 11 April 2025, aged 22, she released Heart In A Cage and stopped. The single was produced by Matt Squire, whose credits run through Panic! At The Disco, Simple Plan and All Time Low, and co-written with Kanner, who has worked with Katy Perry, Blackbear and Set It Off — a pairing that tells you the intention was rock songs with a radio chassis rather than a genre costume change.

The song is about the moment of recognising her own power to get out of a one-sided relationship, and it is structured so that the guitar carries the argument: her riff drives it, and a short electric solo does the work a second chorus would normally do. Her own line at the time was plain enough — that it marked the start of a new chapter. She called it the first single from a debut EP.

She took it straight out on the road, supporting Ava Maybee on the Gold Star Sticker Tour between 28 May and 14 June 2025, through Seattle, Portland, Denver, Phoenix and Los Angeles. That run is where the live version of the project — solos in full, played rather than programmed — got its shape.

Two EPs, eighteen months apart

The debut EP, Oh, Honey Isn't It A Shame Now, arrived in 2025 and gathered Heart In A Cage with Known Better, Mr Melodramatic and Talk About It. It is a heartbreak record that keeps interrupting itself to play guitar, and its songs have stayed in the live set since.

Then came the singles SMH and Misbehave in 2026, and on 25 September 2026 the five-track EP The Bliss Of Ignorance, which pairs those two with Intuition, All To Myself and Don't Bother. Rock Sound's write-up called it spiky, sassy and sensational rock, and singled out the scale of Intuition and the guitar work on Don't Bother as the most ambitious things she has recorded. A video for Don't Bother, built around a performance take, went out the same day.

The label matters as much as the music here. The Bliss Of Ignorance is her first release since signing to ARRO Records, the imprint co-founded by Twenty One Pilots frontman Tyler Joseph. For an artist who was playing 200-capacity Los Angeles rooms in 2024, that is an unusually direct line into one of the larger rock audiences currently touring.

Lollapalooza, then Victoria Park

The summer of 2026 did the rest. On Friday 31 July she played the BMI stage in Grant Park at Lollapalooza Chicago, on at 3.20pm with a nine-song set: Nerve, Fall Apart, Known Better, Mr Melodramatic, Misbehave, SMH, Don't Bother and Talk About It among them — five of the nine still unreleased at that point.

On 30 August she played All Points East in London, on one of the smaller stages earlier in a day headlined by Twenty One Pilots, with Wunderhorse, PVRIS, Nova Twins, NOAHFINNCE and Honey Revenge also on the bill. One reviewer who went in cold noted that the stage was small and the crowd was not — and that most of the people there already knew the songs. What stood out to them was the guitar playing rather than the presentation, which they described as incredibly talented and played with real passion.

Later in the headline set, during the B-stage section, Twenty One Pilots debuted Robot Voices from Breach and brought Grace out to play it with them. Dork's review of the day summed up the sequence in one line: after her own set of funk-rock groovers, she joined the headliners for the live debut. She followed the festival with UK headline shows including YES in Manchester and The Lower Third in London — small rooms, taken on immediately after playing to a festival-sized crowd.

Where she stands, late September 2026

As of the EP release on 25 September 2026, Grace has 17 dates on the books. From 9 October she is the opener on the US leg of Knox's Midwest Best Tour: Paradise Rock Club in Boston, Union Transfer in Philadelphia on the 10th, the 9:30 Club in Washington on the 12th, Brooklyn Bowl on the 13th, KEMBA Live! in Columbus on the 15th and St Andrew's Hall in Detroit on the 16th, then west through the Ogden Theatre in Denver on the 20th, The Depot in Salt Lake City on the 21st, Wonder Ballroom in Portland on the 24th, Ace of Spades in Sacramento on the 27th and the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles on the 29th. It closes out through House of Blues San Diego, The Van Buren in Phoenix on Halloween, House of Blues Dallas, Emo's in Austin, The Masquerade in Atlanta on 5 November and the Neighborhood Theatre in Charlotte on the 6th.

Wedged into the middle of that is the outlier. On 17 October she supports Twenty One Pilots at their Ohio Stadium homecoming show in Columbus, on a bill with Death Cab For Cutie — two days after playing a club in the same city. The gap between those two rooms is the clearest measure of where the career currently sits: still an opening act by billing, already being handed stadium stages by the band whose label she is signed to.

The playing is the point

What the recent live evidence shows is an act whose selling point survives being compressed into a support slot. The Lollapalooza set ran nine songs with no covers and no guests; the All Points East set was read by at least one reviewer as funk-rock rather than pop-punk, which is a useful correction to how the records are usually filed.

The consistent note across the reviews is that the guitar work is not a garnish on a singer-songwriter project. When she was handed a single unfamiliar song on a stadium stage in front of someone else's audience in August 2026, the job she was given was to play guitar on it.