Daughter From Hell

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<b>The singer-songwriter refines her emotional pop on a deeply felt third album.</b> “Oh well, look at my life,” says Gracie Abrams on <b>“Look at My Life,”</b> one of the songs on her third album <i>Daughter from Hell</i>. “Bet you can’t tell but it’s kind of a bad time.” And yet, from the outside, the singer-songwriter looks like she’s actually having kind of a <i>great</i> time. There’s been breakout success (following her 2024 record <i>The Secret of Us</i>) and A-list support, including from Taylor Swift, who invited her on The Eras Tour and collaborated with her on her Grammy-nominated 2024 hit “u.” Still, as Abrams tells Apple Music, things can be very different under the surface. “I started writing ‘Look at My Life’ when we were on tour for <i>The Secret of Us</i>,” she say. “It’s about the contradictions internally and externally when something looks a certain way, but feels differently inside. Feeling confused and guilty about struggling despite the fact that something might look bright and shiny. Feeling deep gratitude while also feeling like you’re losing yourself a little bit.” “Look at My Life” is one of the more upbeat, synth-based tracks on <i>Daughter from Hell</i>, which elsewhere finds Abrams embracing soft, organic sound, helmed by her regular collaborator Aaron Dessner and anchored by her fragile, whispered vocals (the album’s credits also include Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, pop producer Dan Nigro, and her boyfriend Paul Mescal, a co-writer on <b>“Imaginary Friend”</b>). If “the spectrum on this album is more mountainy, kind of folky-sounding things and then stuff that’s a bit more modern,” as Abrams puts it, she thinks <b>“What If It’s Right?”</b>—on which she’s joined by Marcus Mumford—perfectly encapsulates the former. <b>“Hit the Wall”</b> meanwhile captures the latter (we’d argue <b>“Minibar,”</b> made with her best friend and pop talent Audrey Hobert, is another good contender). The songs here document themes including heartbreak, betrayal, regret, the strange feeling of falling out of love without really knowing why (<b>“Good Reason,”</b> which recalls Mazzy Star’s “Fade into You” and houses some of this album’s most quietly devastating lyrics), and finding someone who might just be what you need (the sweet, tentative <b>“Afflictions”</b>). The lyricism is often intense, marked by forever feelings (“I’m gonna carry the pain/For my whole life,” she sings on <b>“Broke My Heart”</b>), ghosts of the past, and, curiously, a <i>lot</i> of knive. But Abrams can be funny too, like when she scoff, “Is my façade crumbling? Oh/God, don’t actually answer me, Caroline” on “Look at My Life.” She’s melodramatic—but she owns it. The making of this album was shaped, says Abram, by “community” and the “stability and comfort of routine,” the writing mostly happening in one place after she finished touring <i>The Secret of Us</i> (“I felt really thrilled by the sort of mundane routine,” she says of writing an album that way for the first time). And it carrie, too, “a degree of perspective that I have earned at this stage in my life, being in my mid-twentie.” That’s nowhere more evident than in the album’s title track, a nod to the difficult teenager Abrams says she was growing up. .

via Apple Music

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