David Gray

David Gray has announced four additional dates for his extensive Past & Present Tour, including a second show at 3Arena on Friday, 2 May 2025.Gray’s highly anticipated new album, Dear Life, will be released on January 17, 2025, through his independent label Laugh A Minute Records, in partnership with Secretly Distribution. Possibly the deepest, strangest and loveliest album of his career to date, the album was recently launched alongside its lead single ‘Plus & Minus’.

David Gray’s story is unlike any other. He spent almost a decade striving to make a breakthrough, and when it happened it did so in the biggest way imaginable as White Ladder became one of the best-selling British albums of recent decades and established him as an arena-filling artist. As the years have passed, his songcraft has only been deepened by his natural ability to convey specific emotions, atmospheres or, as heard on his acclaimed 2021 album Skellig, a perception of place - all positioning him in the lineage of classic poetic singer-songwriters rather than lovestruck acoustic troubadours. While the likes of Ed Sheeran, Adele and Hozier have acknowledged his influence, David has continued to follow his own artistic path.

Dear Life is Gray’s thirteenth album. It’s the result of “a starburst of songwriting … it just seemed like the gods of songwriting were being kind. The doubting voices didn't turn up.” An album of emotional crisis and resolution, mortality and faith, reality and illusion, love and heartbreak, magic, science, loss and acceptance. While it is full of yearning and hope, there is an undercurrent of darkness, a tension between competing forces of hope and despair: a cavalcade of emotions in what is his most lyrically-focused collection to-date.

Premiering on The Radio 2’s Breakfast Show, Dave’s new single, “Plus & Minus” catches the songwriter at his most immediately infectious. The song’s piano refrain frames a duet about a fractured relationship, in which his inimitable voice trades words of disillusionment and despair with newcomer Talia Rae, whose smoky vocal simultaneously evokes equal measures of wit and sadness.

Talia Rae will be the special guest on the night.