You might not be able to tell from looking at her, but Gracie Abrams is having a hard time. She’s going to Hollywood parties and feeling miserable. She’s getting involved with emotionally unavailable men who she just can’t bring herself to leave. She’s been “thinking through the hard stuff over light drugs, like every night.” She “felt good for a day, but that stopped.” She’s running out of imagery to describe the depths of her despair and keeps circling back to the old reliables: blood, knives, fire, ghosts.
Listening to Abrams’ third album had me digging into the Gawker archives to reread Rachel Connolly’s excoriating critique of what she calls the “pity me” essay, a phenomenon in personal narrative characterized by “intensely melodramatic depictions of experiences, or feelings about experiences, which just aren’t that bad.” This type of writing tends to lean on hyperbole to hammer home the horror of pretty run-of-the-mill indignities, vague gestures toward societal forces at which the narrator is at the whims, and/or a severe tone mismatched to the relative innocuousness of the situation being discussed. The flaw in a line like, “I’d rather get hit by a train than let you go” lies not in the hyperbole itself, but in the way Abrams fails to make us believe it. The vagueness of her commentary on the cruelty of young adulthood and societal expectations (“what a way to feel in your twenties”) falls equally flat.
This is not to say that there’s no place for sweeping statements or fatalism in personal writing of any kind—this is pop music we’re talking about, after all: melodrama is sometimes literally the name of the game. I love when a song or record reminds me that getting dumped or feeling out of place at what’s supposed to be the best party of your life really can feel like the end of the world. This is one of the greatest puzzles in pop music: how do you find emotional resonance in something shiny, repetitive, and on its surface, often superficial?
Perhaps Abrams could solve that puzzle if her lyricism, delivery, or Aaron Dessner-assisted arrangements rose to meet the emotions she’s trying to convey. Instead, it all comes out in the form of boilerplate folk-pop songs made up of simplistic lines sandwiched between gaspy, focus-pulling breaths. Had I listened to “Broke My Heart” before any of Abrams’ other songs, I might think that her borderline hyperventilating was a deliberate artistic choice meant to mimic sobs or sharp, shallow breaths one might huff out during a panic attack. In the context of the rest of the album, however, it only serves to emphasize her limited vocal range and lack of control over her instrument.
I myself have long been wishing for more unconventional and not-always-pretty voices in pop music—an expansion of the vocal beauty standard, if you will—but Abrams’ voice doesn’t sound refreshingly unpolished. Instead, Daughter from Hell comes off as a reel of impressions of Abrams’ contemporaries: Lorde on “The Knife,” Olivia Rodrigo on “Imaginary Friend,” Ethel Cain on the title track, Phoebe Bridgers on “Hit the Wall,” down to the way Abrams drags out the vowel sounds in “married.” Most of these songs are midtempo ballads that tonally blur together, leaving Daughter from Hell feeling like an already-dated relic of the COVID era of pop music dominated by breathy, sedated vocals and minimalistic guitar-and-piano arrangements. Surely an album with a title like this shouldn’t sound so lukewarm?
The moments of reprieve from the slog are few and far between, and they mostly feel as though Abrams is merely trying on different styles rather than making them her own. Guest vocalist Marcus Mumford’s baritone overpowers Abrams’ flimsy vocals on “What if it’s Right,” except for when Abrams drags out the last word in a grating sigh (“rah-hhhhhiiiight”). “Minibar” might be the best song on the record. It’s also the most out of place, maybe because it’s the only one co-written by Abrams’ childhood friend and frequent collaborator Audrey Hobert. Hobert probably should’ve kept it for herself; she seems better suited to its cheeky, self-deprecating quips about feeling awkward at a party and wondering if everyone can tell that she’s high.
“Look At My Life” is a similar case: its punchy instrumental makes for a fun, indulgent piece of synthpop, but lyrically, Abrams seems so desperate to prove that she’s worth our pity despite being a rich, beautiful, famous-from-birth pop star. I mourn what a song like “Look At My Life” could have been: a meditation on feeling undeserving of one’s privileges, a dissection of the hollowness of celebrity culture. Hell, I’d even take a fully nihilistic embrace of vapidity, as fellow nepo baby Romy Mars achieved on “A Lister.” The “having a terrible time at the coolest party” song is a staple of contemporary pop music, but Abrams isn’t bringing anything particularly compelling to the form, nor is she doing much to differentiate herself from the “big shots and Barbies” she’s partying with. No one is making her go to those parties, and, for what it’s worth, those “big shots and Barbies” probably feel just as insecure standing next to Abrams.
“Noting the existence of a near universally experienced external phenomenon is not the same thing as enunciating some shared element of internality,” Connolly wrote in her Gawker essay. Abrams grasps the universality of her suffering, but doesn’t trust her listeners to do the same. What she never quite achieves on Daughter from Hell is its specificity. Instead, she spoon-feeds it through vague metaphors and monotonous sonics where there should be extremes. Is this Hell? Or just “kind of a bad time”? [Interscope]
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound, and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
