Jack Gray

Jack Gray comes from Mackay in North Queensland, the kid in a musical family who figured out if he learned every instrument, he never had to wait for a band to form. He taught himself drums after watching his dad play in a pub band, picked up guitar and production in high school, then bailed on music school in Brisbane after six months to chase his own thing.

Early singles like Red Rental Car and My Hands caught ears for how casual they sounded while talking about stuff most pop artists keep at arm’s length – messy relationships, bad habits, the weird headspace that comes from chasing a dream. That run fed into his debut EP Nights Like This in 2019, a project that framed him as a proper alt-pop writer, not just another kid with a cracked copy of Logic.

From there, he did it the hard-tour way: support slots across the US, UK and Europe with Dean Lewis, and later runs with Tate McRae, Mahalia, Matt Corby, Maisie Peters and Ella Vos. Those shows pushed him out of Australia and into that mid-tier global lane where the songs have to land in rooms full of people who did not show up for you.

Winter City dropped in 2020, tucked into the I Got 3 single cycle, right as he was in and out of overseas cities. The track reads like a postcard from cold streets and strange apartments, the kind of touring headspace where the skyline is new but the loneliness feels familiar. It sits in the same world as Take Our Time and the rest of his early catalogue – conversational lyrics over production that blends live instruments with clean electronic touches.

Now based in Los Angeles, Gray has turned that groundwork into a proper run. He has clocked more than 30 million streams across his catalogue, signed to Island Records Australia in 2025 and opened that chapter with Dumb Sh*t, a loose, nostalgic single about small-town chaos and being young enough to treat bad decisions like a sport. His debut album is lined up for 2026, written and mostly self-produced, which tracks for someone who has always treated the laptop as another instrument.

Jack Gray’s thing is simple: pop songs that feel like late-night conversations, written by someone who has actually done the miles those stories suggest.

Jack Gray is one of those artists that can do it all. He’s the songwriter, producer, vocalist, and instrumentalist on the majority of his tracks. But of all his talents, Jack says that learning music production was the biggest gamechanger for his work.

“I think being a producer has made a massive impact on my music. I think that’s been the biggest thing that’s helped me get to where I am. For me being able to sit in a room and get out all of the bad ideas and experiment, find what I do like, what I don’t like. I feel like getting into a room with other producers and other writers. That can be very scary, wanting to try weird ideas that might come out really bad.”

Through that process of elimination, Jack has been dropping a constant stream of singles, as well as his debut EP, “Nights Like This”. His discography (so far) darts between tracks that’ll punch you in the heart, and sunny indie-rock jams that are impossible to have a bad time to. With the amount of time this man spends in the studio, we know there’s lots more music to come.

At the beginning of the year, Jack Gray had been settling into his new life in Los Angeles. In 2019, his life was on double speed, touring across North America and Europe, and writing and recording plenty of music. But when the pandemic began, he knew he had to get home to Australia, ASAP.

“I got the next flight home and I packed like all of my stuff. It’s over there still in my car, all of my clothes. I took like a little suitcase and all of my production stuff is still over there. So that’s a bit annoying, but I got home, and nine months later, here we are.”

Jack says that this year has been focused on the people around him. “I’ve got such an amazing family and it’s been such a privilege to be able to hang out with those guys and spend some quality time with them and be home. Like I’ve got a lot of good friends here. I’m a people person, you know, family and friends. And that has kind of been so special for me and just writing a bunch of music too. So it’s been productive, but also like rejuvenating, which is cool.”

Raised in Mackay, Queensland, Jack recorded this episode on an extended trip to Sydney – spending the beginning of summer with the interstate mates he’s spent most of the year apart from.

“Some of my biggest influences outside of music, I think are my friends. And I’m so lucky to have the coolest friends in the world that are all doing a similar thing, whether it be an artist project or producing or something like that. And to be able to grow with these people and spend a bunch of time with them and learn from each other, I think that’s super cool.”