Chartbreaker: How ‘Bloodstream’ & TikTok Took Alyssa Grace From Cheesecake Factory to the Hot 100

Trending on Billboard Three months ago, Alyssa Grace was still working as a server at the Cheesecake Factory when her breakout song “Bloodstream” hit the Billboard Hot 100. While her co-workers “were all freaking out,” the moment was a wake-up call for the rising singer-songwriter. “I was getting a little overwhelmed,” she recalls of juggling her day job with her burgeoning music career. “So I was like, ‘Let’s focus on this one thing.’ ” Soon after, she gave her two weeks’ notice. Such tunnel vision showed immediate results. Since entering the chart this June at No. 93, the aching and acoustic “Bloodstream” has reached a No. 45 high. The single — only the third of her career, all of which arrived this year — features on Grace’s July debut EP Spilling My Guts that includes the previously released “Dog With a Bone” and “Picking Petals.” Grace is now playing the first shows of her career to massive crowds, opening on tour for Alex Warren across Australia and New Zealand (his wife, Kouvr, was an early fan). Grace’s first headlining tour — a 14-date stint including shows in New York, Los Angeles and London at 500-capacity venues — kicks off Sept. 21. Born Alyssa Grace Proffitt in Torrance, Calif., the 19-year-old artist was raised on Taylor Swift (whom she would listen to on the radio with her mom) and Sublime (whom her dad would play instead). “I got a little bit of everything growing up,” says Grace over Zoom on a Friday morning, having just woken up after one of Warren’s shows the night before. “Once I hit middle school, I started getting into Lizzy McAlpine when she [released] ‘Pancakes for Dinner,’ and Phoebe Bridgers — those were definitely my early inspirations.” Meanwhile, her grandpa was teaching her how to play the guitar, and by age 11, she wrote her first song. “I remember having my first anxiety attack, and I was freaking the eff out,” she says. “I wrote my first song about that. When you’re super young and have anxiety for the first time, you don’t really know what’s going on. You feel like you’re dying. Sometimes I still feel like that. And I didn’t know what the feeling was, so I had written this song and my parents heard me and that helped me get help.” That confessional style of songwriting has become an early staple of Grace’s growing discography. “Bloodstream” serves as the best example, with lines like “I am my father’s daughter but I’m nothing like him at all/ I hear him in the way I speak/ Or when I look in the mirror/ The anger’s grown in me it shows/ Could it be any clearer?” Equally about a toxic romantic relationship as it is family trauma, Grace believes the song resonates because of the wide net it casts: “It could be about a dad, a brother, a boyfriend, an ex-boyfriend, a best friend… Seeing everybody’s stories has been so amazing.” After first teasing “Bloodstream” on TikTok this April, Grace noticed how many fans were relating it to their own parents, which in turn inspired her to dig deeper. “I was like, ‘This is a song that I can finally talk about my experience with [my parents], too.’ ” While she says they have always been supportive of her — helping her book appearances on local news stations in Idaho, where the family moved in 2020 as Grace entered her teens — a rift in their relationship came early in her career. “We weren’t really talking at the time when I started writing music, and this brought us back together,” she says. “It was really hard to open up about, especially because we are rebuilding our relationship and I didn’t want to jeopardize that.” Grace has relied on her TikTok community for such honest and immediate feedback since she made an account in October 2024, launching with the username laughoutloud17 and just a few thousand followers all hooked on her original songs. “If you really scroll back, it’s me in a white Oxford shirt in every single one of my videos because I would get home from my shifts at 11 p.m. and play music for hours.” She now posts under her artist name and boasts 1.2 million followers — and is even verified, which she proudly shares happened the morning of our interview. Her digital-first mentality, bolstered by reshares and organic clipping from fans online, is exactly what helped an A&R at Artist House discover her on TikTok last year. Grace signed a record deal with the independent label this January and soon after signed with its management arm, Artist House Music Collective (AHMC). “When someone shows up with real emotion and rawness, you feel it,” says co-manager Jade Ehlers. Adds co-manager Adina Friedman, “We were immediately struck by her natural ability to connect with an audience.” That ability helped her engagement reach a fever pitch with “Bloodstream,” which Grace posted a clip of just 10 minutes after writing its first draft. Friedman says the song is “the clearest expression yet of what makes Alyssa so special.” Along with Grace’s earnest, cracking wails (which Friedman calls “intimate and imperfect”), Friedman also cites her specific songwriting, saying “she speaks about this anger and the fear that the people we love can become a permanent part of us.” Alyssa Grace McKenna Mobley As the song continues to build, Friedman says the strategy is the same: listen closely to her audience. “Organic momentum led to more than 100,000 pre-saves before the song was ever released,” she notes. “Alyssa instinctively knows her community, which was ready to champion the song, and our role was to help harness that enthusiasm.” Grace calls her intuition her “superpower,” and says everything she has released so far has been based on her own feelings. “I think it’s important to think about how other people are going to relate,” she says, “but you should be writing for yourself.” She admires artists like Audrey Hobert and Noah Kahan for doing just that, and always staying true to themselves. She’s hoping to showcase more of herself, beyond TikTok, on her upcoming Wanna Be Singer headlining tour — aptly named after her Instagram and TikTok bio, which reads the same. Despite her current success, she has no plans of changing it any time soon. “I’m a big fan of just doing what you love and people loving that you’re loving it,” says Grace. “I really want to be an artist that people are like, ‘She’s very real — and not just a trend.’ That’s what I’m striving for, is to have longevity and be somebody that people can look up to for so many reasons, not just one song.”