Knives. So many knives. Gracie Abrams’ third album is like a cutlery drawer full of daggers, stuck in her back, waiting to be twisted by a two-faced friend. She’s “cut to the bone” by a lover’s careless words. She even has a song called The Knife, where she proclaims she’ll live with a blade “in my side” as an act of defiance: “They’re daring me to pull it out / I’ll probably keep it for a lifetime.”
The 26-year-old singer’s record is called Daughter From Hell, a reference to her rebellious teenage years, and it arrives with a flurry of anticipation. Abrams has been making introspective, confessional pop since the end of the 2010s, but her career took off with her 2023 debut album Good Riddance. That year she supported Taylor Swift on the Eras tour and earned a Grammy nomination for best new artist. In 2024 she scored her first UK number one with That’s So True, a single from the deluxe edition of her second album, The Secret Of Us.
“Gracie Abrams' third album Daughter From Hell has sharp lyrics but is let down by muted production and 16 tracks.”
Daughter From Hell has a broad theme of responsibility, as Abrams accepts blame for her mistakes without letting others off the hook. On the stunning ballad Good Reason, she struggles with the idea of a relationship fizzling out with no major disagreements, just the gut feeling it’s not working. “I’m only half sure that I mean it,” she sighs as she calls it off. “If only I had a good reason.” Broke My Heart finds her on the other side of a break-up: “How could I know you and not have a clue? No difference to you / but you just broke my heart.” The knife, she’s realised, cuts both ways.
Aaron Dessner from the National co-wrote the album – he has also produced Taylor Swift, Abrams’ big hero – and this feels like another gesture away from the multiple pop writers of the 21st-century LA song factory. The melodies are simple and pretty, all a little bit like her first big hit “I Miss You I’m Sorry”, released a month into the pandemic. There is much acoustic finger-picking, one of the things that makes her feel Nineties, like that melodic one-hit wonder Lisa Loeb. Olivia Rodrigo was inspired to write the Nineties-tastic “Drivers Licence” when she heard Abrams’ early songs.
Yet for all its incisive, witty lyrics, the music on Daughter From Hell is largely the same as before: low key, whisper-soft, self-interrogating, floaty and inconsequential. The pianos are always muted, the drums all sound like they’re being played next door, and the orchestra is buried deep in the mix to foreground Abrams’ voice. Cold Goodbyes had hinted at a darker, more gothic aesthetic with an unsettling synth drone – but it’s an outlier. The album, at 16 tracks, is simply too long. As one critic put it: “As I would not eat a whole cake, I would be happy with seven Gracie Abrams songs instead of 16.” The homogeneity feels like a step back in time, though whether the modern attention span can handle such a constant musical voice remains an open question.
