Katie Gregson-MacLeod

A history student with a Sony contract

Katie Gregson-MacLeod grew up in Inverness, where her parents played Amy Winehouse, jazz and Motown around the house and her mother, a pianist, sang with her from early childhood. She was writing songs by about twelve. She released a first single, Still a Sad Song, in 2020 and put out a self-released EP called Games I Play in 2021 while studying history at the University of Edinburgh. In early 2022 BBC Radio Scotland put her on its list of twenty-five artists to watch, which at that point was the extent of her public profile.

On 4 August 2022 she posted a one-minute clip on TikTok of a stripped-back piano ballad called complex, written in a single evening about loving someone who cannot love back in the same measure. She told The Line of Best Fit in November 2022 that the clip had thousands of views arriving hourly by the next day. It passed a hundred thousand overnight and went on to more than seven million. Within weeks other artists were singing it back to her, and Camila Cabello recorded a cover that Gregson-MacLeod still jokes about between songs.

She released the demo three weeks after the clip and signed to Columbia Records, part of Sony UK. Greg Kurstin, the producer best known for his work with Adele, built a full version around the original vocal take rather than re-recording it. She said at the time that it had been important to get the song out in its rawest form first, and that the speed of the platform could leave a songwriter feeling helpless once something took off.

Two EPs, an Ivor nomination and a parting of ways

Columbia put out the EP Songs Written For Piano in 2022, followed by Big Red through Sony in 2023. That year complex was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically, and she won the Vega Breakthrough Award at the Scottish Music Awards. She moved from Inverness to London in 2023 to be closer to the industry.

Her shows in that period were solo. NME reviewed her set at Horatio's during The Great Escape in Brighton on 12 May 2023 and described a packed, buzzy room, the singer alternating between piano and guitar with no band behind her. The set ran through I'm Worried It Will Always Be You, TV Show, Second Single Bed, I Want To Be Your Girlfriend, Body, White Lies and complex, and the reviewer made as much of her self-deprecating introductions as of the songs themselves. She presented I Want To Be Your Girlfriend as her most embarrassing song, written the day before the relationship ended.

The major-label chapter closed in 2024. The Skinny, reviewing her next record in June 2025, put the split down to a difference of opinion about where her sound should go, and noted that Columbia had released only one intimate piano-led EP under the deal before the two sides parted.

Helmsdale, strings and no piano

She signed to Last Recordings On Earth, the label run by the songwriter Matt Maltese, and went back to the Highlands. The EP Love Me Too Well, I'll Retire Early was recorded at a studio in Helmsdale on the Sutherland coast, produced by Josh Scarbrow, and released on 4 July 2025. It runs just under seventeen minutes across five tracks: the title song, James featuring Joesef, Chess, I Just Think of It All the Time and Mosh Pit. Mosh Pit came out as a single on 10 April 2025 and James followed on 21 May 2025.

The record is her first without piano. DIY gave it four stars out of five and described it as ditching heavy piano ballads for an intimate splay of strings. The Skinny gave three, calling it as warm and personal as the rest of her work and suggesting that a full-length album could be something great. It reached number twenty-four on the Scottish Albums Chart.

Albatross: the weight of getting what you asked for

Her debut album, Albatross, is due on 6 November 2026 through Last Recordings On Earth. The title comes from Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which the bird turns from an omen of good fortune into a burden hung around the neck. The label's own description frames the record as a study of wanting, and the strange weight of getting exactly what you asked for, written after leaving the major label and returning to the Highlands.

The tracklist runs to twelve songs: 196, Nothing Really Changes, The Big Lie, Good Guess, Sometimes, How Were You To Know, Roadkill, Second Hand, I Don't Think of Kissing You, Same Eyes, Chicago and Daughter. Two of them were already in her live set in January 2026, months before the album was announced. Pre-orders are being taken on cherry cola coloured vinyl and CD.

The shows: a band at last, and rooms that are filling

The current tour is built around the 2025 EP and is the first time she has played regularly with a band. SNACK reviewed her Celtic Connections show at the Barony Hall in Glasgow, a neo-gothic former church, on 30 January 2026, and called it one of her largest headline shows to date. She played the EP in full with a band and a string section, sat down alone at the piano for the older ballads, brought Joesef on as a guest for James, and covered Joan Baez's Diamonds and Rust. Sophie May opened. The hall was full, and Gregson-MacLeod asked the crowd why they were there when Emmylou Harris was playing across town the same night.

The night before, on 29 January 2026 at La Rotonde in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, Belgium, she played twelve songs. The set opened with I'm Worried It Will Always Be You and White Lies, moved through Mosh Pit, I Just Think of It All the Time, James and Chess, took in the Baez cover, then placed complex near the close before finishing with Nothing Really Changes, Teenage Love and Love Me Too Well, I'll Retire Early. That is the shape of a typical evening: the viral song is neither hidden nor made the finale.

The venues remain modest. A Komedia Bath show on 2 June 2026 was priced at twenty pounds with doors at six. In late August she played The Canopi in Cardiff and the Green Note in Camden, and the September run takes in the Cheese and Grain in Frome on the 11th, The Crescent in York on the 13th, Rough Trade in Nottingham on the 14th, The Bullingdon in Oxford on the 15th and ARK in Cliftonville, Margate on the 16th. Songkick lists more than twenty-five thousand people tracking her dates, with London her most-played city at seventeen shows on record.