GRESLEY’s George Smith steps out on his own after a decade with New Hope Club on his debut solo album ‘Songs I Wrote Since She Left,’ a brooding yet radiant reintroduction that captures romantic separation and strain in ten achingly tender, profoundly soul-stirring songs. Written between retreat and reinvention, GRESLEY’s first full-length brings Smith’s private fears fully into view while revealing the creative freedom of an artist finally building a world entirely on his own terms.

Stream: “Piece of Your Love” – GRESLEY

“When I think of you it’s sweet, but it’s torture.”

GRESLEY opens his debut album with a heavy heart, haunted by a love he can’t even think about without coming undone.

Every thought draws her close enough to touch, then makes the distance between them sting all over again. His softened vocal drifts through a brooding, spacious haze, holding joy and pain in the same breath. The music gathers around him like dusk, each swell deepening the sense that desire has nowhere to go. Dread hangs in the air like an inescapable shadow, as though every tender thought carries the threat of another night apart.

It’s a poignant scene set to spellbinding music, and a devastating introduction to an artist stepping forward with nowhere left to hide. Such is the raw beauty, the soul-stirring warmth, and the tender ache of Songs I Wrote Since She Left – an album born from separation and upheaval, then carried forward by Smith’s need to understand who he was becoming on his own.

Released April 24, 2026 via Treehouse Records, GRESLEY’s Songs I Wrote Since She Left is an achingly intimate debut – a moving portrait of love under strain and an artist remaking himself after the life he knew came apart. UK-born, LA-based singer/songwriter George Smith steps into his solo project after a decade as one-third of British pop group New Hope Club, who built a global following on their bright, harmony-rich music and catchy, candid songwriting. As GRESLEY, Smith carries those years of pop songcraft and worldwide touring into a world shaped entirely on his own terms. He writes with greater candor than ever before, following his impulses into a body of work that brings his private, innermost fears and desires fully into view.

The album began during a period of retreat. Back home with his parents after New Hope Club’s split, Smith returned to writing without a campaign or fixed destination hanging over him. Much of the record came together in his bedroom across a concentrated four-month stretch, with several songs later carried from the UK to Los Angeles and developed alongside collaborators including executive producers The Futuristics. It became his first release as an independent artist – a debut born from upheaval, yet driven by the freedom to decide exactly how this new chapter should sound.

For Smith, the scale of an album mattered from the beginning.

He wanted enough room to preserve the full emotional span of this period and let the project unfold at full length. “It’s my debut album, it’s so personal to me. All of these records have a reason to be on here,” he tells Atwood Magazine. “I feel like they are pages from my diary that I have ripped out and put melodies to while my girlfriend and I were apart.”

Exposure and self-possession move together here. Smith invites the listener deeper into his private life because he finally trusts his own voice enough to lead. “It’s the most honest I’ve ever been as a songwriter and also the most confident,” he says. “I was so much more excited by the idea of doing an album over an EP and I just had so much music that I loved and cared about, so I wanted to share with everyone. It’s my first release as an independent artist, and it’s just the start.”

The record took shape through trust. Smith followed the songs until their shared atmosphere became clear, allowing instinct to set the boundaries of GRESLEY’s first chapter. “Pretty early on I figured out what I wanted to do – what I was naturally doing,” he explains. “I didn’t really have to put too much thought into what I wanted to sound like or anything like that; I just made music that I loved, and I feel like there was always something that felt cohesive throughout each record.”

Love gave the project its emotional anchor, while the writing kept testing how much that anchor could hold. “I definitely have a muse for the album, I think you can tell as each song progresses, but I tried to come at it from different angles so it wasn’t just the same thing over and over again.”

The result is a love story seen from alternating distances, each song revealing another pressure point within the separation. Smith keeps returning to the person at its center, while the version of himself doing the looking continues to change.

Smith has a simpler name for the emotional climate he creates: “Yearning Season’s Here.”

The phrase carries a wink, but the ache beneath it is real. Even the album’s title announces the terms plainly, preparing listeners for a record consumed by distance well before the first note arrives.

“I really just think it sums up the whole record,” Smith says of ‘Songs I Wrote Since She Left.’ “I came up with the title while on a flight to LA from the UK in late April last year, and honestly it stuck – it felt memorable, and I think you sort of know what you’re getting yourself into once you press play with a title like that.”

‘Songs I Wrote Since She Left’ names the circumstance; the music reveals the artist who emerged from it. For Smith, the album’s significance reaches far beyond the separation that inspired these songs. GRESLEY is where he finally lets his inner life lead.

“Like I said, it’s the most personal and open I have been in my songwriting, and now that I have the space to explore my own feelings more, I feel like I can create a piece that feels super intimate and honest with myself,” he shares. “I can draw on those experiences and create my own world as my own artist.”

What began as a record of waiting also becomes the sound of Smith claiming his own creative life.

Across Songs I Wrote Since She Left, Smith keeps changing the temperature of the same ache. The shadowed, hauntingly heavy opener “Think of You” sets the album’s emotional terms in a brooding, spacious hush, with Smith left “stuck between heaven and hell” whenever memory pulls her close. His softened vocal hangs inside the song’s darkness, each return to the thought of her reopening the distance he can’t outrun. It gives way to the smoldering “Babyface,” whose warmer pulse and obsessive refrain make absence feel almost tactile; its place in the album runs deeper than its hook, arriving as the song that reignited Smith’s love of writing. “I don’t wash the bedding / It still smells of you,” he admits, finding heartbreak in the traces another person leaves behind.

Propulsive and charming, “How?” pushes the emotion outward with a sweeter energy, dressing self-reproach and collapse in one of the album’s clearest pop rushes, its repeated plea built to be shouted back by a roomful of voices. “How do I make it all alright?” becomes less a question than a cry for absolution, with Smith longing to wake beside the person he fears he has already failed.

The boldly anthemic “Piece of Your Love” stands as one of the album’s definitive peaks, a radiant, full-throated plea that turns romantic surrender into an irresistible singalong. “A little piece is enough,” Smith insists, though the scale of his yearning tells a different story. “You say jump, I say how high / should I laugh or should I cry? My friends say I’m f***ed in the head, but for me it’s fine,” he sings, leaning into the absurdity of total devotion without dulling its sincerity. Smith offers himself up with a grin, willing to meet in the middle even when the middle has shifted toward her side. Its buoyancy sharpens the imbalance running through the record: He keeps asking for less than he wants because any fraction of closeness seems worth the cost.

You won’t bat an eye
For any ordinary guy
You know just what you like
But so do I

Won’t you give me a try?
Give me a chance, honey; give me the night
I swear I’m not like any of those guys
And I’ll show you why

You can play me like a fiddle
I’ll meet you in the middle
Even if the middle’s more on your side
Give me a piece of your love

A playful streak carries into “No Man Without My Woman,” where Beatlesque warmth and sly phrasing soften the desperation beneath Smith’s devotion. “I would travel the country / Hell, even the world / But only Monday to Sunday,” he promises with a wink, letting humor carry the weight of total commitment. “Loser” follows with an equally disarming mix of self-deprecation and sincerity, finding confidence in the person beside him while his old fear of abandonment keeps him awake. “I’m scared that one day I’ll wake up / You’ll be a dream that I made up,” he confesses, allowing insecurity to creep beneath the song’s easy charm. Even at his lightest, love remains powerful enough to resurrect him and precarious enough to vanish by morning.

The album cuts deepest when domestic detail overtakes grand declarations. “She’s My Girl (Interlude)” is a brief, tender devotion, its simplicity giving Smith’s affection nowhere to hide. Its central confession – “All I know how to do / Is write songs about her / Then keep on without her” – could double as the album’s thesis. “Missing You Already” stretches that intimacy into one of the record’s most affecting performances, watching a familiar morning become painful in real time as his girlfriend gets ready to leave. “You’re not even out the door / Please come back a second more,” he pleads, shrinking the unbearable prospect of separation into one last stolen moment. Each ordinary movement carries emotional weight, and the promise to be waiting when she returns lands with the force of a vow.

Fittingly, those are the songs Smith returns to most. “It’s hard to choose a favourite, as that changes most days, but I always find myself coming back to ‘Missing You Already’ and ‘She’s My Girl,’” he says. “I’m a sucker for a slower song, and I just always end up writing that kind of song.”

The album saves its most complicated goodbye for the end.

A cinematic and sentimental finale, “The Boys” reveals the other absence shaping Songs I Wrote Since She Left. Smith closes the album by looking back at New Hope Club with tenderness rather than bitterness, accepting that change became necessary even as part of him still hopes they might begin again someday. “There’s no point living in the past / When there’s nobody here to blame,” he sings, before leaving the door cracked with one final wish: “I hope we take it from the top someday.”

The song builds toward a cathartic instrumental release, letting the emotion break through where language reaches its limit. What began in the aftermath of a romantic departure ends with Smith grieving a shared past and stepping toward the future that GRESLEY made possible.

Now they’ve got something to talk about
Even just for a day
It’s not like we had a falling out
We just needed a change
Sometimes you just can’t win
So you start all over again

Maybe the boys are better off
This way

While Smith’s favorite songs are the ones that cut closest to the heart, his attachment to the album also lives in the small phrases that make it unmistakably his.

Asked which lyrics he loves most, he first points to the playful vow in “No Man Without My Woman”: “I would travel the country, hell even the world, but only Monday to Sunday, all just for a girl.” “I just think it’s a funny one,” he says.

His favorite details often arrive without calculation. In “Missing You Already,” Smith singles out “Stick the kettle on.” “I love using English-ism’s in my writing,” he explains. “I think it’s fun to say things that are super conversational, again it makes the song feel lived in and not too thought out you know. I really don’t do those intentionally, I just say them out of the blue and it sticks.”

“Break It” carries the same instinct in “It’s the English in me being polite.” “I think I say ‘sorry’ after every minor inconvenience that I cause,” Smith says. “I think that’s an English thing to do?”

All these English-isms do more than locate Smith geographically; they keep the album grounded in the habits and reflexes of an actual life. A kettle switched on downstairs or an apology offered almost automatically can carry as much weight as any grand declaration, because Songs I Wrote Since She Left understands how absence settles into the everyday. Smith hears it in a bed that still smells like her and feels it the second a hand slips from his own. These songs live in the unbearable overlap between having someone and already missing them, where devotion offers shelter while feeding the fear that it could all disappear in a blink.

The romantic ache unfolds alongside another rupture. Smith was still reckoning with the end of the band that had shaped his adult life, and one separation created the space for him to face another. Distance gave Songs I Wrote Since She Left its ache; starting over gave GRESLEY his reason to exist. Its dreamy gentleness recalls the open-hearted sweep of Harry Styles’ self-titled debut, while the spacious melancholy of early Coldplay comes to mind in some of its darkest passages. Yet Smith’s own identity comes through in the emotional exposure he sustains from beginning to end. He lets devotion remain needy and overwhelming, trusting his voice to carry every fear without sanding down its edges. Warm, wistful, and wondrous all at once, Songs I Wrote Since She Left introduces an artist willing to make intimacy the entire world – and suggests that GRESLEY’s most revealing adventures have only just begun.

After all that yearning, Smith is ready to get out of his own head and into a room with the people who have been listening.

“I just hope people enjoy it and feel like they are a part of this journey with me,” he smiles. “I’m so grateful for all the support in the lead up to this album, and I’m honestly so excited for all this music to be out in the world!”

Independence has already taught him plenty, and the next step is simple: Take these songs onstage and keep following where GRESLEY leads. “I think throughout the making of this record, I have learnt a lot about myself,” Smith adds. “Being an independent artist has been a new experience for me, but I am loving having all the creative control and being able to release on a consistent basis. I’m very excited to be able to get out on tour and start playing these shows to the people who are loving the music.”

For all its ache, Songs I Wrote Since She Left never closes in on itself. Smith spends much of these songs missing one person, yet the record leaves room for anyone who has ever watched someone leave and wished the goodbye could wait just a little longer. That’s the beauty of GRESLEY’s first chapter: It begins in one man’s longing and opens outward until the rest of us are standing there with him. It’s a wonderful place to begin, and a collection made to be held close by all those who hear it.

Experience the full record via our below stream, and peek inside GRESLEY’s Songs I Wrote Since She Left with Atwood Magazine as George Smith goes track-by-track through the music and lyrics of his debut album!

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Stream: ‘Songs I Wrote Since She Left’ – GRESLEY

:: Inside Songs I Wrote Since She Left ::

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Think of You

As soon as we wrote this one, I instantly knew that it should be the track to kick off the album. It sets the tone for the record from the get-go, it feels super personal with the softer vocal delivery and the darker feel of the song is completely different from anything I have done before. I for sure was overdosing on the ‘Parachutes’ album by Coldplay and the whole Pink Floyd discography at the time of making this track and I’m not afraid to say it.

Babyface

This was an interesting one, it was actually the first song I wrote for the project. I was back at home living with my parents, sort of regrouping after my old band had split up. I was writing here and there not really putting any pressure or pursuing anything too crazy, but this song came to me while I was sitting with a coffee one morning in the garden and I started playing the chords for the chorus. Something clicked, I ran straight to my bedroom and wrote the song within 30 minutes. That was when I really I found the love for songwriting again. From then on I was inspired to create a set of songs around this one.

How?

My first single! ‘How?’ came pretty soon after ‘Babyface.’ Like quite a few of these records, I started in my bedroom in the U.K. and finished off in Los Angeles. This was one of my favourites from early on in the writing process for this record, so it always felt right to be my debut single. I think is one of the more ‘pop’ leaning songs on the album, and I can’t wait to play this one live on my tour as I think it’s going to be so fun with everyone screaming that bridge all together.

Piece of Your Love

Around this time, me and my main collaborator on this album, Tor Miller, were obsessed with walking to sessions no matter how far. We would meet up early, grab a coffee, have a cigarette and chat about what we wanted to do that day while walking to our session! It was our first time working with Chance Emerson and sometimes it takes a minute to get going the first time around but honestly it was the easiest to write on the album, we were going around singing the chorus back and forth and then everything just flowed from there, trading off lines and everything seemed to fit. I remember listening to this song when I got the first bounce back that night in the car on my way to get In-N-Out and playing it obnoxiously loud…

No Man Without My Woman

I’m such a Beatles head and I think of this one as my homage to the ‘Rubber Soul’ album, that’s in my top 5 of all time no doubt. I think the opening verse is so fun and playful, it shows a side of my writing that I feel like I hadn’t really touched on yet, not taking myself too seriously and just having fun with it while still trying to keep it in the same tone as the rest of the record. I feel like we found a great balance on delivering a poignant message and delivering it all with a sense of humour.

Loser

I made this one with David Alexander and The Futuristics. This was our second day together, the first day we had written ‘Think of You’ and we wanted to try something a little different but nothing was really coming, we were trying a few little ideas and I ended up going into the bathroom with my guitar and by the time I came out I had written the chorus, from there we wrote the rest of the song pretty quick but we never did a demo recording of it. A couple of weeks went by and I found myself singing the melody for the chorus over and over, I made a demo and sent it to everyone. We all remembered the song and had to get back in asap to finish it off.

She’s My Girl (interlude)

Honestly one of, if not my favourite. I went back to the old way (2020) of writing for this one. I ended up doing this on Discord with Tor, I remember we were just chatting and catching up while I was back in the U.K. and then next thing you know we had a song. We only had these two sections and even though we tried to add a new part nothing really felt right as everything flowed so effortlessly. I had really been getting into production more since moving back home and it’s the first song that I have produced fully myself from start to finish. I’m excited to keep improving my production skills as I develop as an artist.

Break It

This was the last song I finished for the album, produced by a good friend Shykid. I had a few other songs that were going to be in place of Break It, but overall I felt like this song was the best fit. This one went through a few different iterations and a couple different name changes. I felt like as this song was the last to be done on the record I could kind of go a little weird with it both production and melodically. This is the only song where I use my head voice a lot throughout, it was nice to try something different and I love how the bridge just keeps going and gets progressively more aggressive almost. It feels like I’m spiralling more and more as the song goes on.

Missing You Already

I actually had the original idea for this song about 2 years before I finished it. Every time I picked up a guitar I would always play this chord progression with the same picking pattern and had never really gotten to a place where I knew where I wanted the song to go. The day I wrote this one I remember waking up super early to see my girlfriend getting ready to leave town for a while and then everything else fell into place and as I slowly started workshopping the song with a few of my friends. We ended up with this song that doesn’t really follow a normal pop structure and that’s what I love about this one, I feel like it makes the song feel a little more timeless.

The Boys

Probably the most emotional of the bunch for a multitude of reasons, I think the song is pretty self-explanatory when it comes to what it’s about but I love the way this one builds throughout the whole song and the release of emotion when the solo comes in after the second chorus really hits. The lyrics were pretty easy to come by I just really wanted to make sure that this kind of song was done tastefully. I feel like I achieved that and it’s almost a nod to the past, looking back on fond memories and excited for what lies ahead.

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