The EP Was Always Coming – She Just Wasn’t Ready
Before Simone Ashley ever set foot on a film set, music was already there. She just kept it to herself. For years, while the world came to know her through Sex Education and then Bridgerton, the songs existed in private – written, felt, held close. This year, that changed. Ashley released her debut EP, Songs I Wrote In New York, and in doing so stepped into a version of her public life she had never allowed before.
She had to be ready first.
“I finally felt ready to share this side of myself,” Ashley said in a recent interview. “Music has always been part of my life, even before acting. Acting lets me step into someone else’s story, whereas music is a chance to tell my own. I never really saw it as choosing one over the other, because they fulfil different creative parts of me.” That framing – not either/or, but parallel – says something about how she’s approached this release. It isn’t a departure from acting. It’s an expansion she’s been planning quietly for a long time.
New York Did What New York Does
The EP’s title isn’t incidental. Every song on Songs I Wrote In New York came out of the period Ashley spent living in the city, and New York functions less as backdrop than as active ingredient. “There’s something about New York that makes you feel completely anonymous one minute and incredibly inspired the next,” she said. That particular tension – invisibility and electricity occupying the same moment – runs through the record’s emotional core.
The songs are anchored in love and romance, but not in the broad strokes way that phrase usually signals. Ashley describes them as capturing “fleeting moments that end up becoming the memories you hold onto.” Those are the details that don’t make the highlight reel – a conversation that shifts something, an evening that closes too fast, the feeling of a city moving around you while you’re standing still inside it. The EP is where those moments went instead of disappearing.
For Ashley, the music is also deeply visual. Her background as an actor informs the way she builds a song’s world – not just sonically but aesthetically. “I’ve always been drawn to music that feels cinematic and emotional, and I think that comes from being an actor as well,” she said. “I love creating a world around a song, not just musically but visually too. Hopefully people hear something that’s intimate, soulful and a little dreamy.” She’s resisted labeling the sound as any specific genre, and that resistance feels deliberate rather than evasive – the record isn’t chasing anything, which is exactly why it sounds like her.
The Lead Single, the Fifth Season, and What Comes Next
When asked which track from the EP she’s most proud of, Ashley deflected the way anyone would when asked to rank something personal – then landed on the lead single Free as her favorite “right now.” That qualifier matters. It suggests a relationship with the material that’s still evolving, still being understood. The EP isn’t finished being processed even by the person who made it.
Meanwhile, Bridgerton Season 5 remains an open question for fans hoping Ashley returns as Kate Bridgerton. She hasn’t confirmed whether she’ll be back, and the show’s structure – each season historically centering a different sibling’s romance – doesn’t guarantee her continued presence in a leading role. What’s clear is that Ashley is no longer building her identity around that uncertainty. The music exists independently of what happens with Season 5, and that independence feels intentional.
There’s a specific kind of creative risk in releasing personal work after years of being known primarily through someone else’s writing. Every character Ashley has played has been filtered through a script, a director, a production’s vision. Songs I Wrote In New York has none of that insulation. Whatever lands, or doesn’t land, is entirely hers. She kept this part of herself private long enough that releasing it publicly isn’t a calculated brand move – it’s genuinely exposure.
The lead single is called Free, and she named it her current favorite – though she’s already signaling that might shift as the EP settles into the world and she figures out, track by track, which ones people hold onto.
