Freya Ridings

Freya Ridings (born April 19, 1994, in North London) is a British singer-songwriter whose music draws on confessional folk, piano balladry, and indie pop. She grew up in a household shaped by performance: her father, Richard Ridings, is an actor and voice artist best known as the voice of Daddy Pig in "Peppa Pig," and her mother, Cathy Jansen-Ridings, is a playwright. Her father taught her guitar; her mother played piano and harp.^[4]

Ridings attended The BRIT School in South London, the performing arts institution that produced Adele and Amy Winehouse. She has spoken of being dyslexic, which made learning songs through notation difficult and pushed her toward writing her own material from an early age.^[4] What might have been a limitation became a defining creative disposition: Ridings has always written from personal truth first.

Her breakthrough came with the 2017 debut single "Lost Without You," which gained enormous traction after being featured on the UK reality series "Love Island" in 2018, eventually reaching number nine on the UK Singles Chart.^[4] She became the first female artist to write and perform a solo UK Top 10 hit independently, without label infrastructure. Taylor Swift added the song to her Apple Music playlist, and it went on to earn triple Platinum certification in the UK.

Her self-titled debut album (2019) debuted at number three on the UK Albums Chart, was certified Gold, and accumulated over one billion streams worldwide, with 47 Gold and Platinum certifications across markets. She received a BRIT Award nomination for British Female Solo Artist in 2020.^[4]

Her second album, "Blood Orange," was released in April 2023. Her third album, "Mother of Pearl" (BMG, May 29, 2026), continues an elemental creative framework Ridings has described across her career: each record has its own color and material palette. "Mother of Pearl" is water -- "the big blue sea, with all the depth and ancient power of an ocean" -- exploring grief, ancestry, identity, and female resilience.^[1]

Ridings writes from deeply personal experience and has described her process as instinctive rather than calculated. She has cited Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Adele, and Florence + the Machine as key influences. Her songs are known for their emotional directness and for a quality of confessional intimacy that makes them feel like private letters made public.