Gracie Abrams Reclaims Her Narrative On Daughter From Hell
Gracie Abrams has released her most personal album yet. On July 17, the 26-year-old pop artist dropped her third full-length project, Daughter From Hell, a 16-track collection that finds her leaning into discomfort, conflict and the messy middle of relationships instead of the neat endings she often wrote before. In interviews leading up to the release, Abrams called the new record her “favorite music I’ve ever made.”
The album continues her creative partnership with Aaron Dessner of The National, the guitarist who shaped much of her last two records. Dessner co-wrote 14 of the 16 tracks and helped produce the album alongside Bryce Dessner, Dan Nigro and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. Mumford & Sons singer Marcus Mumford appears on the standout “What If It’s Right?,” which Abrams has named her favorite song on the record. Paul Mescal, Abrams’ boyfriend, also has a co-writing credit on the quietly playful “Imaginary Friend.”
A New Approach To Heartbreak Songs
Abrams told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year that she was “careful about writing about conflict and pain from less of a place of pointing fingers and more so of having been on both sides” of the stories she sings about. The result is an album that does not cast anyone as a villain. Tracks like “Look At My Life” and “Broke My Heart” swap the kind of sharp, catchy confessionals that dominated Good Riddance and The Secret of Us for something more unresolvable.
“I was careless in the past writing music about how it might impact the subject, and I don’t like that. I wish I could go back and fix it.”
Olivia Rodrigo, Abrams’ close friend and collaborator, weighed in on the album in a recent Spotify conversation, calling “Afflictions” her favorite track so far. “It feels like the love is very deep and not superficial,” Rodrigo said. Abrams agreed, saying she used to struggle writing about love because she felt it was hard to do the emotion justice without making it feel smaller than it actually is.
Touring Life After Arenas
The new record arrives on the heels of a sold-out arena run that stretched across North America last summer. Abrams will return to arenas with her Look at My Life tour, which kicks off on December 2 in Denver. The tour announcement came as her previous album, The Secret of Us, collected a string of Grammy nominations and cemented her place as one of Gen Z’s most trusted songwriter-vocalists.
Why It Matters
Daughter From Hell shows that Abrams is willing to trade airtight pop narratives for emotional ambiguity, a move that usually scares off mainstream artists at her level of fame. By collaborating with a network of trusted producers and writers, she also avoids the sophomore-label pressure that traps many artists after a breakthrough. The album’s frankness about relationship complexity positions Abrams as one of pop’s most durable storytellers heading into 2027.
