Pitchfork has reviewed Gracie Abrams' third album, Daughter From Hell, and the verdict is that she sounds like an artist pushing past diary-page confession into something colder, stranger and more haunted. Abrams herself had described the record as “a little bit less diaristic, and mildly more existential,” and the album lands with that shift in view.
That makes the timing matter now. Abrams has spent the last few years turning intimate feeling into a commercial calling card: since the 2020 release of her debut EP, minor, she has been excavating emotion in understated pop, and The Secret of Us debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 in 2024 before its bonus track “That’s So True” became a top 10 hit. Daughter From Hell arrives with that momentum behind it, which is why listeners are searching for what changed and what did not.
The record’s production keeps Aaron Dessner close at hand. He is again a co-writer and producer, continuing a partnership that began with Abrams' 2021 EP This Is What It Feels Like, and the sound leans on acoustic guitar, soft percussion and tender strings. That softer frame gives the new songs room to drift, but it also leaves Abrams' familiar emotional habits intact. She is still writing from pain, still circling loss, still pulling feeling into close focus.
The album’s imagery is more severe than her earlier work. Abrams is described as sick, numb, aching, bleeding and burning up, carrying pain for her whole life, while the songs move through auditory hallucinations, shadows, apparitions and the lingering presence of loved ones who are no longer there. On “Mews,” she turns that atmosphere into a smoky ballad about not noticing a relationship’s downturn until it is too late. “The Knife” reaches for high notes so breathy they seem translucent.
Elsewhere, the emotional directness can feel almost disarming. “Good Reason” and “I Love You, I’m Sorry” are airy songs in 3/4 time about letting an unsatisfactory romance lapse, and “Good Reason” includes the blunt confession, “If only you got disappointed/If only I kept every promise/If only you treated me poorly/If only you didn’t adore me,”. “Look at My Life” plays like a step-by-step account of “a new spiral every night.” That is the friction inside Daughter From Hell: Abrams is reaching for something more existential, but she is still working in the confessional mode that made her name.
So the answer to the question hanging over the album is not that Abrams has abandoned the old style. She has stretched it. Daughter From Hell sounds like an artist testing how far she can move from personal detail without losing the ache that made the writing work in the first place, and the next thing readers will be looking for is the release itself.
