Gracie Abrams Can't Find Creativity in Post
The Secret of Us was hyper-manufactured to cement Abrams as an indie pop icon, but unfortunately, mediocrity can't be fixed by Aaron Dessner.
Production can elevate an artist’s work, making their artistry much more than the basic labor of vocal and musical talent. For example, Billie Eilish has a soft, crooning, mumbling, sometimes barely audible voice. Yet, she’s still an ideas-woman; for every song and album, she seems to understand where her voice goes, what kind of beats to incorporate, what tone and mood to set. Before she heads to the studio, she generates an entire universe for her projects. Who better to help her build that universe than her brother and producer Finneas? With his tactful knowledge of audio engineering, vocal processing, and instrumentation, he can make a timid, whispery, frail voice into something either haunting, sexy, melancholic, or straight up cool, depending on the tone of the song. Like a good producer, he listens, and he ensures that Billie Eilish is never lost. While someone else builds the objects into different and fancy shapes, she still provides the blueprints. Talent and imagination from both siblings exude from beginning, during, and after the record’s production.
Relying too much on producers, however, has the opposite effect. Whereas Finneas assists in creating “Billie Eilish,” many producers in the pop/indie pop corner of the industry work with artists that offer no idiosyncrasies, imaginitive ideas, or vocals and/or instrumentation with star potential. This then often forces the producer to resort to almost exclusively polishing their imperfections until they no longer exist. We hear this most clearly in Gracie Abrams’ The Secret of Us, an orderly, highly-manicured, yet still unremarkable record that came out June 21st. The album was primarily produced by Aaron Dessner (The National, Taylor Swift), with Jack Antonoff and Taylor Swift co-producing “us.” Here, Gracie Abrams is attempting to achieve the classic girl-with-guitar trope of writing about “the breathless urgency of spilling your heart out to your closest friend at the end of a whirlwind night.”* This is not a groundbreaking idea, as it lifts a lot of the same language from Olivia Rodrigo’s promotion of GUTS, where the young artist played with the idea of “spilling,” expulsion, and honest confessions to explore her anxieties, her overwhelming feelings about other people, and her moments of both confidence and fear. The sound of Abrams’ album is inoffensive—with some glittery synths, chimes, and warbles contrasting the acoustic guitar throughout—but upon further inspection, one finds absolutely nothing there. Nothing jumps out and provokes the listener’s ears; instead, she relies on her producers to smooth her voice out to something so neutral and pleasing that, if sung by another girl with guitar, could also work for them. She doesn’t use the highly skilled production team to elevate her talents, to execute some hair-brained, auspicious idea she can’t produce on her own. Instead, she allows the producers to completely override her voice, offering a cut-and-paste, soulless presentation of what she wants to pass of as “authentic.”
I typically don’t like to bring in other artists’ work when reviewing albums, but that can’t be the case with Gracie Abrams’ newest record. The Secret of Us suffers from a complete lack of identity, looking instead to other artists and her producers to manufacture one. Sure, Abrams’ vocals are audible—she’s crisp, she’s clear, and she’s not bad—but they’re a Rorschach ink blot of almost every popular female singer-songwriter these days. In many of the tracks, the LA-native artist sings with a breathy, slight country twang, projecting only slightly louder than a whisper (“Felt Good About You,” “Let It Happen,” “Free Now,” “Close to You”). At points, they’re just less interesting Olivia Rodrigo songs: without the capability to manipulate her vocals into a powerful belt, a sustained whistle tone, or even a classic scream, Abrams just takes all the cracks, the curling of the R's and O’s, and the intentional breathiness of her colleague and delivers a monotone performance, not providing any interesting texture. In “Felt Good About You,” the twang; the lyrics, which explore disillusionment and disappointment in an ex-lover; and the mellow warbling of a glittery synthesizer can’t help but evoke some of the moodier tracks of Taylor Swift’s Midnights. In “us.,” Abrams shines the brightest, as she can easily reproduce the writing and production style of her favorite artist (because she has Swift’s two favorite producers, as well as Swift, in the booth with her). Here, she doesn’t need to hide the glee that comes with the mega pop star’s permanent endorsement. The folklore stylization of the title, the direct reference to Swift’s incomprehensible “Gardens of Bablyon” lyric in “cowboy like me,” the sudden love for poetry and fantasized couples that outlast history—the line between “homage” and “rip off” is completely erased. “us.” is Abrams’ best track on The Story of Us because it’s just a rejected folklore song.
Yet least surprising to me is this clear intention to capitalize off the style and popularity of indie rock supergroup boygenius, especially in songs whose lyrics tend to adopt a self-flagellating attitude for a relationship that just didn’t work out. “I Love You, I’m Sorry” is a self-deprecating admission that the narrator, while trying to become the perfect partner, ultimately put their own desires before the other person’s. “That's just the way life goes / I like to slam doors closed / Trust me, I know it's always about me / I love you, I'm sorry,” she bemoans in the chorus, later calling herself as a “dick” with an addiction to keeping the toxic relationship going. Musically, the listener hears a two-part harmony (backup vocals provided by Audrey Hobert) lamenting over a folksy acoustic guitar and occasional tambourine hit. If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because a better version with a similar title already exists: “Emily I’m Sorry” by boygenius. Abrams & team try to reproduce Phoebe Bridgers’ haunting yet delicate double-tracked vocals, or the processing technique of layering two recordings of the same vocal part to create a fuller sound. They only look for the end result —popularity and a cool sound many people like—rather than the imagination and intense consideration Phoebe Bridgers has for the best way she can use her voice. Furthermore, the lyrics are less visceral: Instead of equating a harmful relationship to violent car crashes, freezing winters, and raging fires, Abrams wistfully muses out a window, daydreaming about the love that never was.
“I Love You, I’m Sorry,” as well as “I Knew It, I Knew You” and “Gave You I Gave You I,” affirms that the album’s most ambitious project is to allow Abrams to pretend to be an indie rock artist. She intentionally selects the most stereotypical associations with the genre—acoustic guitars, #SadGirlLyrics, breathy vocals one might describe as “vulnerable”— to clumsily conceal the fact that she has an entire industry fine-tuning every sound until the whole thing sounds composed, orderly, and clean. Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff, and Taylor Swift are basically the Avengers of the pop/indie pop industry (everywhere, a guarantee of a multimillion-dollar check, producers of repetitive content, and liked by a really annoying group of people). Grammy Award-winning musician James McAllister is Abrams’ engineer and synthesizer. Her father is Mr. Star Wars, which probably helped her to get signed to Interscope Records before her debut single was even released. Never once was this woman, by definition, “independent.” With all the wealth and industry support to assemble this group and produce this album, she still sabotaged the “vulnerable,” “indie” persona she wants the listeners to believe. Abrams methodically selected the Swift-endorsed, money-making, hit-making producers to make her record yet erroneously assumed their penchant for “perfect” won’t make her sound like…well, everybody else.
Though it attempts to imitate the all the popular artists’ works around it, Abrams’ record still struggles to understand what makes them special in the first place. Olivia Rodrigo’s songs, whether slow and somber or bombastic and peppy, are filled to the brim with wit, attitude, and incredible vocal arrangements, and no one can deny she was heavily involved in the album-making process. Taylor Swift will always have a distinct writing style inundated with her personal reflections and metaphors. Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, and Julien Baker work like a Capital-B Band, and each song they write together combines the talents of all three both as vocalists and skilled musicians while also considering how production might retain as much of their live, acoustic sound as possible.
Gracie Abrams, on the other hand, is somehow less than a derivative of them. Her lyrics are vague and only somewhat confessional (“Risk,” “Close To You”). Not a single guitar riff or drum beat is memorable. The Dessner-led production didn’t fulfill the promise of assisting her to achieve a “bold, new effervescence” at all; it simply cut out all the rough parts that could have made her look less than perfect.* The Secret of Us reads like a boring, safe album because it was written with a formula in mind—Gracie Abrams wants to claim herself as an indie success story without actually having to go through the necessary work. I don’t care if The Secret of Us sounds clean; I don’t care if the lyrics rhyme almost perfectly every time. I don’t care if her name appears in the ever-growing list of girls with guitars Spotify shoves in my face every week, shouting at me “You should like this!!!” If The Secret of Us had texture (and I desperately wish it did), it’d be Styrofoam: glossy, smooth, squeaky, structured…yet still so full of air.
*Quotation is taken from Gracie Abrams’ Spotify page as of 2024.
Lyrics provided by Genius. The lyrics to “I Love You, I’m Sorry” belong to Gracie Abrams, and the lyrics to “Emily I’m Sorry” belong to boygenius/Phoebe Bridgers.
Header image contains the following: Gracie Abrams’ The Secret of Us, owned by Interscope Records; Olivia Rodriguo’s GUTS, owned by Geffen; Olivia Rodriguo’s Sour, owned by Geffen; boygenius’ the record, owned by Interscope Records; Phoebe Bridger’s Punisher, owned by Phoebe Bridgers; Taylor Swift’s folklore, owned by Republic Records; Taylor Swift’s Midnights, owned by Republic Records. Edited by author.
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That last line omg -loved reading this, Vic