Gracie Abrams Turns the Blade Inward on ‘Daughter From Hell’

The knife is everywhere on Gracie Abrams’ third album. It twists, cuts, gets pulled out and, she suggests, might stay in her side for a lifetime. A piano ballad is simply called “The Knife.” The image is violent but deliberate — a way to describe pain that arrives from inside and out. On Daughter From Hell, out Friday via Interscope, Abrams uses that discomfort as fuel, not just a theme.

The album arrives at a strange career intersection. Abrams, now 25, opened for Taylor Swift and earned a Best New Artist nomination in 2023, then scored a Top 10 single with “That’s So True” the following year. She’s also been flattened into a meme: the perpetually sad girl with rock-hard abs and a famous boyfriend, the nepo baby who shouldn’t complain. On the single “Look at My Life,” she addresses the absurdity directly — getting what you wanted and finding it hollow.

Musically, Daughter From Hell breaks the mold of her early work. The whispery, introspective sound of her first two albums is still present, but co-producer Aaron Dessner helps her lean into rawness and range. The title track is a devastating rock surge, unlike anything she’s recorded before. “Humming,” co-written with Dessner and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, is delicate and disillusioned: “There’s no one at the top to believe / What a way to feel in your twenties.” Across 16 tracks, the songwriting sharpens, trading generalized melancholy for specific adult baggage.

Abrams hasn’t stopped writing about hurt, but she’s stopped sounding resigned to it. The album doesn’t ask for sympathy so much as it tests how much emotional honesty a pop record can hold before it cuts back.