17 July 2026

Gracie Abrams’ new album could be half as long

Daughter From Hell is full of pretty melodies – and makes a retro demand on the attention span

Photo by Alan Chapman/Dave Benett/Getty Images for British Vogue and GQ

Sometimes, an album is too long. As I would not eat a whole cake, I would be happy with seven Gracie Abrams songs instead of the 16 delivered on Daughter From Hell. In her new album, Abrams, 26 years old and born in Pacific Palisades, deals in simple melodies of considerable delicacy, all a little bit like her first big hit “I Miss You I’m Sorry”, released a month into the pandemic. There is a lot of breath-gentle reflection and closely-miked “ts”, a bit of waltz time, a tender presence of falling chords and much acoustic finger-picking – one of the things that makes her feel Nineties, like that melodic one-hit wonder Lisa Loeb.

Through this retro lens, songwriting is vulnerability without revenge, and music is a container – just about – for mental disturbance. It is something I also appreciate in Olivia Rodrigo, who was inspired to write the Nineties-tastic “Drivers Licence” when she heard Abrams’ early songs. Aaron Dessner from the National co-wrote the album (he has also produced Taylor Swift, Abrams’ big hero) and this feels like another gesture away from the multiple pop writers of the 21st-century LA song factory. It’s just that there are so many songs, and so much prettiness, it’s hard to know what to do. Even the homogeneity feels like a step back in time. As though the modern attention span can’t handle such a constant musical voice.

Abrams is the daughter of JJ, king of the franchise and sequel, tenth highest-grossing movie director of all time. Early in her career, she met the nepo baby thing head on, saying that her connections had helped her in a “million visible and invisible ways”. It is somewhat sad that she had to do so, especially as her dad had been creatively cancelled for “ruining” Star Wars and has scaled back his work. The title track is an apology to her mother for being a teen tearaway – though despite the heavy Dessner chords, it is not a wild song: “Daughter from hell but I came around / I try to become you now”. The “simple, short song” she co-wrote with her boyfriend Paul Mescal, “Imaginary Friend”, is sub-Taylor Swift – a Swift song without the twists.

Daughter From Hell (Interscope Records) is available to stream now