Gracie Abrams has spent two albums perfecting the art of the whisper. On her third studio effort, Daughter From Hell, she finally lets herself yell a little, and the results are her most compelling work yet.
Produced once again with Aaron Dessner, the sixteen track collection finds Abrams reckoning with her mid twenties in real time, the strange in between of feeling both thrilling and lonely, still tethered to the adolescence she’s trying to outrun. She’s talked about writing this album from a quieter place after coming off tour, and that stillness shows up in the record’s most vulnerable corners, even as the production pushes into new, occasionally rougher territory.
The clearest example of that new register is “The Knife,” a stunning piano ballad that turns pain into something almost hypnotic. Knives show up again and again across the tracklist as Abrams’ go to image for heartbreak, the way it twists and lingers, but nowhere does the metaphor land harder than here. She sings about living with the blade in her side and taking it for a joy ride, daring herself to pull it out and knowing she probably won’t. It’s the kind of writing that made her a favorite of Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo’s circle in the first place, delivered with a little more nerve this time around.
“Broke My Heart” leans into the album’s more classic pop instincts, a bruised, hook forward track that sits comfortably alongside her best singles while still carrying the emotional weight the record demands. It’s one of a handful of songs here dealing directly with heartbreak, alongside “Good Reason” and the car obsessed “Mews,” and it’s proof Abrams hasn’t lost her ear for a chorus even as she stretches into moodier, more experimental spaces elsewhere on the tracklist.
Then there’s “Death Wish,” the song fans have been waiting well over a year to hear in its final form. Abrams first debuted it live and unplanned during a tour stop, a mellow piano confession about a manipulative ex that spread fast and became a fan favorite almost overnight. The studio version swaps that stripped down piano for fingerpicked guitar and a noticeably quicker pace, turning what was once a hushed lament into something with real momentum behind it. The lyrics haven’t lost an ounce of their bite. If anything, the new arrangement makes the song’s portrait of a bulletproof, remorseless ex hit even harder, especially set against an album that otherwise tries hard not to point fingers.
That effort to see both sides of every breakup is one of the record’s defining threads, and it’s what makes the album’s biggest collaboration feel so fitting. “What If It’s Right?” brings in Marcus Mumford for a stripped down, folk leaning duet that leans into the “mountainy” half of the sound Abrams has described for this era. The two voices circle the same uncertainty from opposite sides, trading a kind of shared confusion instead of a clean resolution, and it’s one of the rare moments on the album where a guest voice doesn’t just decorate the song but actually completes it.
Daughter From Hell isn’t a total reinvention. Dessner’s fingerprints are all over it, and there are stretches where the atmosphere starts to blur together the way it has on Abrams’ past two records. But the highs here are genuinely her highest, and the willingness to sit with contradiction, to be both the wronged party and the one who did the wronging, gives the album a maturity her earlier work only gestured at. It’s a record about growing up without pretending to have it all figured out, and that honesty is what makes it stick.
