Rosa Walton Steps Out with ‘Tell Me It’s A Dream’

Rosa Walton’s first solo album arrives after years of gathering stray material. As one half of Let’s Eat Grandma, the East Anglian singer and multi-instrumentalist built a Mercury-nominated catalogue that bent art-pop into future-facing shapes. But some ideas simply belonged elsewhere. ‘Tell Me It’s A Dream’, out now, collects those off-piste melodies and lyrics into a record that moves her songwriting onto different ground.

Where Let’s Eat Grandma often leaned into synth textures, Walton set out to make a guitar record. She cites mid-80s cerebral pop – Prefab Sprout, The Cure, Scritti Politti – as points of reference. Working with producer David Wrench, she shaped a sound that feels crisp and direct, with occasional appearances from bandmate Jenny Hollingworth on vocals. The collaboration is natural, not a break from the past but a branching out.

The solo project gained momentum from an unlikely source. Walton’s track ‘I Really Want To Stay At Your House’, created for the anime series and video game Cyberpunk 2077, has surpassed 400 million streams. That figure didn’t just validate her reach; it sharpened the confidence to pursue a full-length outside the duo. The album doesn’t rush to capitalize on that number. It works instead at its own pace, balancing sadness and liberation, as on the fragment-inspired opener where sparkling arpeggiators give way to guitar lines.

‘Tell Me It’s A Dream’ is not a departure but an expansion, proof that a songwriter’s surplus can find a structure of its own.