The Gracie Abrams Conundrum

On the recent promotional tour for her new album, Gracie Abrams appeared on the New York Times’ music podcast—the aptly named Popcast—and spoke, over the course of eighty-odd minutes, about a range of topics. One revealing avenue found Abrams speaking on the criticisms she often gets from online communities; she accepted and discussed the ‘nepo baby’ critique (Abrams’ father is Star Wars director J.J. Abrams, her mother film producer Katie McGrath), and more interestingly alluded to the common meme of blocking her (“I’m so upset about England being kicked out of the World Cup I’m blocking Gracie Abrams,” etc). Indeed, for a while now Abrams has been the target of somewhat unwarranted online abuse, in the form of users vowing to block Abrams’ profile when something hacks them off; the ostensible goal here is to turn her into a kind of bag that gets punched each time is necessary.

The Popcast interview seemed, for the first time, a tacit recognition of her perception, before she diluted the meme into feigned concern of the callous tendencies of online pop stans (even the most offline of us know not to listen to unemployed Nicki Minaj defenders telling us to kill ourselves). Yet in many recent interviews, like this one, Abrams has mostly come across as kind, well-spoken and informed; she is one of the more outspoken stars of her generation, having endorsed Kamala Harris in the run-up to November 2024 and sharing a number of posts on her social media in support of Palestinians, amidst the ongoing genocide committed by Israel. She recently appeared on one of this writer’s favourite podcasts, Table Manners, hosted by mother-daughter Lennie and Jessie Ware, and learned what a Yorkshire pudding was. By all accounts, she seems delightful, but more than that she seems for the most part earnest and self-aware.

These are qualities that are sorely lacking in her music, which is unfortunate considering her chief occupation as a musician (though she’s wisely diversified her career as of recent; she is also a Chanel ambassador and, soon, a film star). Despite immense popularity—here in the UK, her single ‘That’s So True’ spent eight weeks at number one, and she’ll undertake a four-night residency at the massive O2 Arena next spring—her music remains, to me and to others, an utter conundrum. How can something this popular be this infuriating?

Abrams’ bloodless music has, for the most part, been warmly received by critics; then again, it’s worth considering the mostly toothless state of music criticism. The bar is below the Earth’s crust when the once-feted Rolling Stone describes the stilted and dull new Taylor Swift album as harbouring “new, exciting sonic turns to incisive storytelling,” yet the increasingly risky nature of negative criticism—in the past, critics of popular artists have been doxxed, received death threats, had pictures of their family pulled up for scrutiny—has sanded the edges of a good number of writers. Last year, the New Yorker ran a piece tellingly entitled ‘How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge’, in which longtime critic Kelefa Sanneh recalled numerous points where critics, decades ago, were abrasive and even rude, but as of recent even “relatively negative reviews tended to be strikingly solicitous [and] polite.” Though a couple of reviews for Abrams’ new record haven’t been as kind, plenty more are adoring (four-and-a-half stars from Rolling Stone).

Too often, any criticism that isn’t glowingly positive gets shot down; when the famously harsh Pitchfork gave Madonna’s recent Confessions II an 8.1, her highest score since 1998, many still bemoaned the fact that it wasn’t higher. It’s the same reason lots of our popstar interviews are conducted by the Jake Shanes and Alex Coopers of the world (no disrespect to either, who are both personable, watchable hosts if not incisive interviewers); these formats facilitate warm, fawning interactions that bring the interviewee down-to-earth, but scarcely yield the incision one would’ve found in a Rolling Stone profile thirty years ago.

In a way, the plastic, insincere sheen of modern music commentary suits an artist like Abrams, whose music often feels like an airplane-meal substitute for the real thing. She wears her influences—particularly the Swift-Lorde-Bridgers songwriter trinity—on her sleeve, to her detriment. Her lyrics are often autobiographical, often about boys, and it’s not that there’s anything wrong with either of those foci (many songwriters have written about their experiences with men to great effect), it’s that Abrams lacks the vocabulary to ascend beyond platitudes or imitation. Her songs are full of ‘you, you, you’ accusations, where she tells the addressee what they are and what they did, like on ‘I Knew It, I Knew You’ from her last record: “I was your entertainment from a dark place / You don’t know how to step outside yourself.” They’re the kind of broad, empty descriptives that could make an arena-ful of fans go “Ugh, me,” and use it as an Instagram caption or fridge magnet.

When she’s not accusing, she’s recollecting, and these are the songs that hew most closely to Bridgers’ mantra of specificity equating to universality (like on ‘Moon Song’, when a fight about John Lennon illustrates her tendency to accept little in relationships). Abrams seems to have learnt the wrong lessons from Bridgers, who often writes observationally; on the Swift-featuring ‘us.’, she sings about how “You were talking false prophets and profits they make in the margins of poetry sonnets […] Robert Bly on my nightstand.” It’s gobbledygook dressed up as profundity; nowhere in that passage is it illustrated who these characters are or why we should care, any more than a subsequent, simpler line: “You’re incomparable, fuck, it was chemical.” We never get to understand the dynamic in anything but the broadest strokes: that her lover was ignorant, or cruel, or pretentious, or all three.

Then there’s a song like ‘Tough Love’, the relationship of which has a nature that’s difficult to ascertain beyond its title. Abrams scarcely gives us any clues, playing Whac-a-Mole with syllables: “I took a train to Boston and I wanted to cry / He’s gone, I’m twenty-four and it’s a Saturday night,” she gasps, running out of breath between the rushed phrases. The issue is that there’s not enough thought in each thing being sung, but even if there were the information is coming too thick and fast for you to process any of it, Abrams singing as though she’s being paid by the word.

Abrams’ conversational, quick delivery on ‘Tough Love’ and many of her other songs is not unlike that of her friend and songwriting partner, Audrey Hobert. Hobert’s breath control and meaningful lyrics facilitate the breakneck, deadpan style of a song like ‘Bowling Alley’, a caustic and funny song about imagining being everyone’s favourite person at a party: “So I walk in hot, oh great, nobody noticed / ‘Til I hit that strike, then everybody noticed me!” The rambly effect complements Hobert’s stream-of-consciousness lyricism; less so Abrams, who aims to craft evocative vignettes but ends up feeling like that oversharing person at a party you can’t get away from.

Yet beyond her lyrical shortcomings and out-of-breath vocal stylings, the fundamental truth of Abrams is that we still don’t know who she is. A lot of her songs sound like other people (‘Hit the Wall’ The National, ‘Close To You’ Lorde), a lot of her lyrics seem cribbed from the diaries of others (her ‘you did this, I said that’ hews close to Swift’s tried-and-true methodology), but what makes Abrams different from any of her influences? In the precious attention economy, our busy lives generally mean that we have a finite capacity for music. With this logic, a hypothetical question can be posed: why get the diet version of indie folk pop from Abrams when your valuable time would be better spent with an Adrianne Lenker or a Bon Iver?

Of course, Abrams’ fanbase skews young, young enough not to recognise the Adrianne Lenker or Bon Iver influences in her work, and have the luxury of being able to read it on its own terms rather than as a product of Abrams’ idols. To them, her songs do not scan—as they do to her critics—as hollowly imitative, since they have not gone back and listened to that which she is imitating. (Nor should they be expected to—what twelve-year-old is blasting 22, A Million?) The broad style of Abrams alludes to specificity and nuance while remaining digestible and placid enough for radio, but also to the extent that her subjects are vague enough that her listeners can map them onto their own lives. It’s not that this approach is inherently worse—pop is frequently bulldozer-subtle on purpose—but that it feels like a failure of craft for Abrams, who often positions herself among more esteemed, subtle songwriters. Her music too often fails to match the parameters she has set for it.

That brings us to Abrams’ newest album, Daughter From Hell. Credit where credit’s due: this is the first album where Abrams, albeit briefly, lifts her foot from the ‘you you you’ pedal and starts taking accountability. Some of these songs are interesting in concept because of how they examine her own faults; the trouble is, they flail in execution. The title track is intended as an apology to her mother for being a problematic child—as she put it on Popcast, “lots of sneaking out […] I would put myself in positions that were actually unsafe.” It makes her sound like every other teen, but that wouldn’t be an issue if it were expressed all that interestingly, and it comes off as one of those cheesy coupley songs people write for each other, rather than the title track of an album. The song’s earnest sentiment is undercut by a sharp truth: this is a deeply poetically licensed scenario, to the point of wondering why it exists. (When Abrams explained the premise of the song on Popcast, host Joe Coscarelli kept kindly fighting back, saying her actions didn’t feel they warranted an apology—a telling indication of the song’s Achilles heel.)

That is the case across much of Daughter From Hell, a record that feels like it makes mountains out of molehills. This is a fault that can be chalked up to her running out of creative inspiration—after all, this album has arrived remarkably quickly after her last—but as a body of work it falls on its face. At the risk of sounding like a pretentious film bro, the lyrics too busy insisting upon their own self-importance for you to get invested at all. Abrams is fixated on overwrought phrases that mistake wordiness for complexity, yet the (exhaustingly many) metaphors she uses tend to fall into one of four categories: cliché (“I’m a drop in your ocean”), repetitive (there are far too many references to weapons for someone who grew up in a gated community), telling us things that she is (a slipknot, a pill, a knife—she becomes so many things that they wind up having equal weight) or just plain incorrect (when she sings, on ‘Death Wish’, how “your eggshell floor is splintering now,” she forgets that walking on eggshells is already a famously splintersome task). She is a child of Swift in that she favours eighteen words when three would do.

The music, meanwhile, is uniformly maudlin and never really crescendoes beyond a polite whisper; ‘Sober’ is practically draft-like (derogatory), the loungey ‘Mews’ coasts in one ear and out the other. Of course, making quiet, hushed music is not a fault in itself—one of my very favourite records, Sufjan Steven’s grief-stricken opus Carrie & Lowell, only has two real builds across its forty-odd minutes—but the record is baked in the kind of gothy angst that would call for something louder, some drums, anything! One of the only points that prompts a lean forward in your seat is on ‘Look At My Life’, where the beat throbs and pulses and threatens to go somewhere. If it never quite takes off the way it should, it’s one of the few points where the sonics even tangentially match the record’s concept. A lyric on ‘The Knife’ proves telling: “I’m all bark, never would bite.”

It is, naturally, stars like Abrams that prompt me to stop and interrogate the frightful misogynistic impulses that have been hardwired into my brain. Would I take Abrams to task as much if she were, say, a man? I wonder. It’s easy to say, yes, I would, because it’s far easier to signal virtues than have to enact them. Still, I think of a male equivalent of Abrams like Ed Sheeran, who—albeit being much further into his career than Abrams—is friendly and well-meaning, yet whose musical output is abhorrent (bypassing even the critical barometers—Pitchfork have never given him more than a 5.3 out of 10). Sheeran once admitted that the first thing he did every morning was check the charts, but one senses that Abrams isn’t quite as fixated on ubiquity or numbers. She seems genuinely committed to her art—Daughter From Hell is her third album in four years, yet has done numerous interviews and profiles to the extent you’d think it was a big comeback—and her live shows focus on her material rather than technical wizardry or production embellishments.

Perhaps it is more fitting, then, to compare her to Swift, who (however chart-fixated she has become in recent years) has called Abrams a “genius brilliant young lady,” and selected her to open for some of the stops on her landmark Eras Tour. Swift’s tightly wound storytelling often focuses on scenarios, moving as a poem does with sensory descriptions first: red scarves, high heels on cobblestones. However calculated or staged, these vignettes are unique and give listeners something to read into or try and decode; Abrams’ nonspecific writing cannot be read into any further than surface level, her characters feeling half-drawn and cartoonishly generic. Credit to Abrams for keeping her audience at arm’s length while maintaining the illusion that she’s being brutally honest, but it’s an illusion that won’t hold unless she properly develops her writing on future records. I don’t love her, I’m sorry.