Over the past 4 years, Gracie Abrams has skyrocketed to the highest of each unhappy woman summer season playlist. Her EP This Is What It Feels Like and final 12 months’s debut album Good Riddance helped put her on the map whereas laying the groundwork for a fruitful collaborative relationship with Aaron Dessner. After a summer season spent opening for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and notching a Finest New Artist Grammy nomination on her belt, Abrams’ songwriting is extra evocative and grown up than ever, as heard on sophomore album The Secret of Us.
The folky-pop LP is a correct showcase of Abrams’ songwriting, sharpening up a few of the clichés and adolescent metaphors from her debut. The songs are a fancy image of a relationship gone bitter, filled with heartbreak songs that seize the messiness of courting in your early twenties. Alongside Dessner, Abrams co-wrote a number of of the songs along with her greatest good friend Audrey Hobert. Lots of the lyrics really feel as very like an open letter to an ex because it does a textual content relaying your deepest, darkest secrets and techniques to your closest confidant in the course of a sleepless night time.
The Secret of Us opens with the plucky observe “Felt Good About You,” a tune which may as properly be the thesis assertion of the album: “Felt good about you until I didn’t/Fell exhausting then I misplaced your curiosity,” she sings midway by means of the tune. Together with lead single “Danger,” the opening of the LP makes an excellent case for Abrams’ pop sensibilities, turning her typically intimate, subdued sound into one thing extra catchy, melodic and bubbly.
Nonetheless, Abrams musical consolation zone is when she’s at her most devastating and brooding. “Blowing Smoke” finds her incapable of erasing the picture of an ex with a brand new girlfriend, spiraling out about how fairly and funky she is perhaps. Her duet with Taylor Swift delivers as properly, particularly since it is rather aptly Observe 5 on the album. (All Swiftie students know {that a} Observe 5 on a Swift album is usually essentially the most emotionally devastating). “Us.” sounds a bit like Swift’s Huge Purple Machine collaboration Renegade as Abrams sings about “Babylon lovers” and asks “Do you remorse the key of us?” Swift herself is sort of a heartbreak information to her devoted scholar, providing a number of reflective traces as Abrams recovers from an older paramour.
Because the album progresses, it’s clear that the extra bubbly-sad aspect of Abrams’s music is her subsequent degree value exploring. Moments like “Powerful Love,” a Noah Kahan-esque ditty that has the singer selecting her associates over chasing “random males” has the kind of dynamic sonic vitality that Abrams may thrive in exploring extra. No marvel followers had been begging her to launch “Near You” for years, the album’s closing observe which she previewed on Instagram method again in 2017. For a while, Abrams made clear that she wouldn’t be releasing it because it didn’t match her present sound, however the synth-pop enhance is proof that not solely may she have a tune of the summer season contender on her palms but in addition obtain one of the best of each musical worlds, very like her very well-known mentor has. Regardless, The Secret of Us proves Abrams is setting the tone for a really lengthy profession and that she’s not in any hazard of dropping her prime placement on any unhappy woman summer season playlist for a protracted, very long time.
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