Gracie Abrams - "The Secret of Us"

Emotional vulnerability with a side of fangirling

Gracie Abrams is back with her sophomore album just over a year after her debut, and despite the short turnaround, this record demonstrates a lot of growth — or, at least, movement — in Abrams’ sound and songwriting approach.

So let’s start there. Her 2023 debut album, Good Riddance, was primarily a Whisperpop album tinged with a bit of Swiftian sensibility. After the album released, Abrams spent a lot of time touring with Taylor Swift for a leg of the Eras Tour, and it shows. As Abrams stated in an interview with Elle, “Being in Taylor’s orbit for the summer completely altered every single thing for me. It informed so much about how I went about writing this next album.”

As a result, the album is a fresh new amalgam of genres and styles, with different elements coming out on top in different songs. Whisperpop is still present on a few songs, such as “Normal Thing”, but then you have a number of other Pop subgenres, including Country, Folk, Chamber, and Indie, all with a very Swiftian emphasis on strong lyricism.

And, make absolutely no mistake, the lyricism is the highlight of the album, as it remains strong even on the weakest songs. Because while several songs are phenomenal, several others just aren’t — they’re bland (e.g. “Good Luck Charlie”) or otherwise just feel conceptually incomplete. “Tough Love”, for example, has a high tempo, rushed rhythm which feels like it outruns the melody. “Blowing Smoke” has a similar rhythmic structure through the chorus, but remains melodic and doesn’t try to force the tempo to remain up ‘just because’.

And, generally, the first six tracks stand well above the rest of the album, in terms of quality. Among these six is “Us”, which features Taylor Swift, making it an immediate highlight. Because it’s Taylor Swift. Yet, “Us” sounds barely more like a Taylor song than the four that came before it.

And I really feel like this is the album’s major issue. How much of this is Abrams emulating Swift (though various eras) in order to learn versus how much is a result of having Aaron Dessner¹ as a producer, I really can’t say. I am choosing to see the stylistic experimentation within The Secret of Us as exploration by a young artist.

As a result of that, I’m hopeful that Abrams will begin settling into her sound next time around. The Secret of Us is just too sporadic — the styles are not really blended well; and it’s not like the songs are evolving as-needed, like with Sleep Token’s AOTY-winning Take Me Back to Eden, they’re just subtly different, like they were stylistically modeled after a different Swiftian era.

With all of that complaining out of the way — The Secret of Us isn’t bad. Abrams is a talented vocalist and writer. I just think she can do better; and I think that taking more than a year to create her next album could help her to actually ensure that each song’s composition fully supports her strong lyricism.

Swift fans will likely enjoy this one quite a bit, as well as those who are looking for strong-but-vulnerable poetry about navigating relationships and breakups.

I expected a step up from her debut (and, to be fair, it is if you look only at lyrics and themes), but this feels like a stumble on the road to musical self-discovery.

Rating: Green

1. Dessner has produced for Swift on every album since Folklore. I started counting songs, but hit like 25 and I was maybe half done? They’ve worked together a lot. Dessner is a core player in how Taylor’s sound has evolved in the 2020s.