Gracie Abrams' third album reaches for goth turbulence and lands on sugar
The singer-songwriter's third record wants to be a horror show. What it actually delivers is a confection.
On her third album, Gracie Abrams commits to the bit. The cover is blood-red. The track titles flirt with vengeance. The press cycle has leaned gothic. The songs themselves, however, arrive dressed in something closer to a wedding-cake tier than a funeral veil, all pastel piano and breathy benediction. The record wants to scare you. It cannot quite stop winking.
This is the bind at the centre of Daughter from Hell: a body of work pitched as emotional extremity, delivered with the restraint of a conservatory recital. Abrams has built a fanbase on diary-grade intimacy, and her songwriting remains disciplined. But discipline is not the same as darkness, and the album's most ambitious gestures tend to dissolve into the kind of melodies that score a coming-of-age montage rather than a confrontation with anything genuinely infernal.
The costume, the choreography
The album's goth-coded presentation is its most discussed feature, and the easiest to read. A title invoking damnation. Imagery that flirts with hauntings, hexes, and vampiric longing. A visual rollout in which Abrams plays the role of the wronged woman turned revenant. The framing signals a record interested in excess, in the operatic register that pop has long borrowed from its theatrical cousins.
Inside the songs, the temperature drops by exactly one degree. Melodies stay diatonic. The piano stays mid-tempo. Abrams' vocal performance remains, as ever, murmured rather than unleashed. The result is a record whose packaging promises catharsis and whose delivery offers comfort. For listeners who arrived on the back of her previous work, that comfort is probably the point. For anyone expecting the promised inferno, the absence registers.
What the songs actually do
Taken on their own terms, the tracks are precise. The hooks arrive where hooks should. The arrangements leave room for Abrams' voice, which has grown into an instrument of considerable control, able to sustain a whisper across a four-bar phrase without wavering. There are moments that work on craft alone: a bridge that pivots unexpectedly, a chord change that lifts a chorus without resorting to volume.
What the songs do not do is surprise at the level of their declared ambition. When a lyric reaches for menace, the production underneath reaches for reassurance. When a vocal line strains toward anger, it lands back in tenderness. The emotional range on offer is the inside of a snow globe, not the weather outside it. For a record that has been marketed as a reckoning, the dominant register is reconciliation.
The pop-cultural inheritance
There is a longer story here than one album. Pop has spent the better part of a decade mining a vocabulary of softness that presents itself as depth: breathy delivery, confessional lyricism, production that emphasises air rather than weight. Abrams is one of the more accomplished practitioners of that mode. Her songs work because they respect the listener's intelligence enough to understate.
The risk of that mode is that it can begin to mistake understatement for substance. Daughter from Hell leans further into theatrical framing than its predecessors, suggesting Abrams heard the criticism that her music can read as adolescent and decided to respond with costume rather than confrontation. The response is legible. Whether it lands is a question the streaming numbers, and the critical reception, will answer over the coming weeks.
The stakes, for Abrams and for the mode
A third album is the hinge point of a pop career. The first announces; the second confirms; the third either consolidates or pivots. Abrams has chosen, here, to gesture toward a pivot while holding the consolidation intact. That is a defensible commercial choice. It is also a missed opportunity for the kind of risk that would force a re-rating from listeners who have heard this register before.
For the broader mode of which Abrams is a leading exponent, the album is a useful case study. Soft-pop confession has been one of the defining sounds of the 2020s. Its dominance has produced extraordinary work and a great deal of undifferentiated product. Daughter from Hell is better constructed than most of its peers. It is also a reminder that construction alone does not guarantee impact. The songs need somewhere to fall, and this record has not yet built the floor.
The sources reviewed for this piece do not specify first-week sales projections, label positioning, or comparative streaming performance against Abrams' prior records. A fuller assessment of where this album sits in her catalogue will depend on those numbers, which were not available at the time of writing.
This publication framed Abrams' third album as a craft question first and a cultural question second: can meticulous songwriting carry a record whose packaging promises more than its delivery provides? The wire review, by contrast, led with the gothic packaging and read the songs through it. Both readings are defensible. Only the streaming chart will settle which one the audience endorses.