Preview: Grace Elizabeth Harvey Brings Songs Of Devotion to Rough Trade Liverpool
Grace Elizabeth Harvey brings intimacy, imperfection and Songs Of Devotion to Rough Trade Liverpool.
Grace Elizabeth Harvey’s relationship with Liverpool seems to have deepened at much the same time as her songwriting has begun looking more closely at another kind of relationship: the difficult, imperfect business of trying to connect with other people. On 15 October, those two strands come together when the Wirral-born singer-songwriter plays her headline show to date at Rough Trade Liverpool, marking the arrival a day later of her new EP, Songs Of Devotion.
It feels like an appropriate place for the record to begin its life. Harvey has lived in Liverpool for the past couple of years, but describes the last twelve months as the period in which she has really begun to feel connected to the city, finding both people and places that now feel like home. Just as importantly, she has become part of a community of songwriters whose influence seems to extend beyond music into friendship and collaboration. One of them, Jed Timms, will support Harvey at Rough Trade.
“It feels so special to be doing a hometown show for the EP’s release,” she says. “I’ve found spaces and people that feel like home, and I am feeling very inspired by all of the amazing songwriters in the city.”
Songs Of Devotion itself is concerned with something considerably more elusive. Its title track examines our intrinsic need for connection and the emptiness left when communication breaks down. Harvey describes the wider EP as an attempt to confront the limitations of language and explore those in-between spaces where meaning can become difficult to grasp.
That sense of absence runs through Devotion. Love becomes something almost physical but unreachable, while memory, words and identity become increasingly uncertain. By its closing lines, even reading, writing and dreaming cannot quite satisfy the desire for something more.
Importantly, Harvey and producer Gus White resisted polishing those uncertainties away in the studio. Guitar and vocals on Devotion were recorded live, with the intention of capturing a performance — an ‘artefact’ rather than something perfected after the event.
That idea of the song as something tangible extends beyond the recording itself. Songs Of Devotion will be available digitally, but also as a physical 10-inch vinyl release — a format that feels particularly appropriate for music created with such an emphasis on presence, imperfection and capturing a moment. In an age when a new release can so easily become another collection of files arriving on a streaming platform, there is something quietly significant about giving these songs a physical existence too: something to hold, turn over, put on a record player and live with. I like that.
It also makes Rough Trade an especially appropriate setting for the Liverpool launch. On the eve of the EP’s release, the songs will exist first as performance and, a day later, as physical object, preserving something of the same intimacy Harvey and White sought when they recorded them.
Harvey will be joined onstage by Jen Morgan on double bass, Matthew Humphries on drums and Eva Jones on cello, recreating the core line-up used to record the EP. The set will include Songs Of Devotion in full alongside material from Other Faith and, intriguingly, plenty of new music. Harvey says she is currently in a prolific writing period and experimenting with a more dynamic sound.
Rather than attempting to reproduce the recordings note for note, however, Harvey seems interested in preserving their freedom. Songs, she says, are ‘malleable things’, capable of changing each time they are performed. Onstage, microphones are kept dry and the musicians respond to one another in the moment, an approach particularly important to EP opener An Ode. There may also be special guests joining the band for some of the newer material.
Perhaps that willingness to leave a little space for uncertainty is what makes Harvey’s idea of the Liverpool show so appealing. Asked what she hopes somebody encountering her music for the first time might take from the evening, her answer isn’t about being impressed by the performance. It is about leaving Rough Trade and looking at things differently.
Good songwriting, she suggests, can remind us of the colour and detail in the world that we routinely overlook. Her own practice is driven by “playfulness and a desire to connect”, and ultimately she hopes an audience might leave feeling creatively energised themselves.
For an EP concerned with what happens when words fail us, that seems a fitting ambition. On 15 October, Songs Of Devotion leaves the recording studio and becomes something shared — imperfect, changeable and, for one night in Liverpool at least, happening in the same room.
Grace Elizabeth Harvey – Songs Of Devotion EP Launch
Thursday 15 October
Rough Trade Liverpool
Doors: 7.30pm
Support: Jed Timms
Tickets
Songs Of Devotion is released Friday 16 October 2026 digitally and on 10-inch vinyl.
Follow @graceelizabethharvey on Instagram for updates.
