Maeve McDermott

USA TODAY

Simon Cowell famously pegged Grace VanderWaal as "the next Taylor Swift" during her season-winning run on America's Got Talent in 2016. With her first full-length album, she's looking to make that comparison stick.

In the year since she won season 11 of the reality competition last September, the 13-year-old has more than successfully avoided the post-win burnout that has sank the careers of many other performance-show victors. In the past few months alone, VanderWaal has signed to IMG Models, become the face of Fender guitars and appeared on red carpets and awards shows with her fresh-faced friends including Millie Bobby Brown and Maddie Ziegler.

But VanderWaal was always a musician first, and her full-length release is the appropriately-titled Just the Beginning (out Friday). Flashes of vintage Swift shine through the album’s 12 tracks, which has much grander musical ambitions than VanderWaal's uke-strumming may have initially shown.

More:Grace VanderWaal on 'Moonlight,' depression and almost turning down Simon Cowell

Over the course of Just the Beginning, the young singer proves that she can successfully channel pop starlets twice her age. Burned recalls Swift’s high-drama orchestrations. Insane Sometimes is a dead ringer for a Halsey track, down to its troubled subject matter. VanderWaal's big-throated performance on A Better Life channels Florence Welch and Miley Cyrus. And the vaguely tropical-house production of Florets is seemingly crafted for pop radio.

There’s a certain chirp in VanderWaal’s voice that’s reminiscent of Swift, but otherwise, her vocals align much more closely to Sia’s in her full-voiced belting and nonchalant pronunciations, particularly on her stomping performance on the feisty So Much More Than This. In VanderWaal’s musical language, vowels get twisted and mashed together like Play-Doh, and consonants are treated as just a suggestion.

But, while so many pop stars seem to bypass their tweenage phases, skipping from child-star status to full-grown adulthood, VanderWaal sounds like a 13-year-old in her songs, in the best possible way. In a voice that sounds refreshingly green, she launches herself at huge choruses with a total lack of restraint, and it’s lovely to hear.



Beyond the album's sleek pop production, there's still plenty of VanderWaal’s trademark ukulele strums to please her original fans, heard on the album’s single Moonlight as well as highlights Just a Crush and Escape My Mind.

But it’s A Better Life, the song that so masterfully channels several of pop’s biggest voices, that best combines VanderWaal’s two modes, opening with her modest finger-picking before she unleashes one of the album’s most exquisitely-sung melodies.