Blending reality and fantasy, the release examines the thrill and confusion of womanhood.
The project finds the London artist entering a bold new era of pop: playful, self-aware, and still deeply rooted in the underground. Over the past five years, the Shepherd’s Bush-raised musician has steadily earned her place in the UK’s independent music canon. Across projects like her dreamy 2021 interest rates, a tape, 2022’s inward-looking Running In Waves, to the genre-spanning Un/limited Love in 2023, Riley has continued to raise the bar, balancing versatility with precision. Then there are her expertly-curated collaborations with SBTRKT, Sampha, John FM and Hudson Mohawke. More Is More however, allows Riley to enter more conceptual subject matter through the medium of shimmering pop, all through her own, left-field vision.
More Is More’s concept was shaped by ideas of excess: digital overwhelm, hyper-consumption, public image and the messy contradictions of desire. Riley reflected the thoughts she had on these themes via a vision of a woman replete with tensions: “she’s smart and owns a lot of books, but has she read all the books? She’s fashionable, but is it performative or actually authentic to her?” It’s part self-portrait, part satire – a caricature drawing from personal experience of relationships, temptation, ambition. It stemmed from “wanting more of everything, wanting more of my life, my career. Whatever success you have is never enough, there’s always something else.” That hunger – romantic, artistic, material – is threaded through the record with a winking irony.
Birthing the project during a quiet, year-long stretch where she wasn’t hitting typical career milestones, Riley paradoxically felt more liberated than ever. She chose to channel that by writing from the headspace of abundance. It was seeing “how these things can set women on a dark path” amid the rise of right-wing conservatism, whether that’s the tradwife boom or prominence of OnlyFans influencers. Riley interrogated her own feelings and desires as a woman, looking at her relationship with money and the societal pull of heteronormativity and marriage alongside a stacked list of production minds such as UK hitmaker Mura Masa, club legend Bok Bok, genre-shifting mainstay JD Reid and PinkPantheress collaborator phil. 
As well as making a work of smart, unconventional pop, George Riley is asking larger questions about womanhood – navigating desire, visibility and ambition. While More Is More sees Riley shifting between satire and sincerity, it also marks her most confident and musically assured work to date.
