Equal Parts Heartbreaking & Honest, Gracie Abrams Releases Her Debut Album
Photo by Danielle Neu
Graphic by Tallulah Totten
Written by Eli Nava
Gracie Abrams reflects on being in her early twenties in her achingly honest debut album, Good Riddance. The album comes after a series of singles and two EPs. The album maintains Abrams’ gentle vocals and minimal production style. Throughout twelve tracks, Abrams gets intimate with her listeners about heartbreak and the conflicting feelings that follow a breakup.
Beginning with her signature style of subdued vocals and quiet guitar strumming, “Best” opens the album and can ultimately be described as an “I’m-the-problem” song. Abrams painfully reminds herself and listeners of her faults within her relationship, culminating in an outro and final chorus that repeats, “I never was the best to you.” Continuing on this melancholic thread, “I know it won’t work” sincerely works through the insecurities that come after the fallout of a relationship. “You will love me until you resent me,” Abrams closes the first verse with an honest reflection on losing someone you love. After the facade of the relationship shatters, Abrams expresses her desire to mend the wounds between herself and her past lover, yet understands that this is not the way reality will go.
“Full Machine” balances itself between self-awareness and falling back to old habits. With similar cohesive production as the previous tracks, healing her heartache is on the horizon for Abrams. “I’m codependent / But trying hard not to be,” Abrams sings. The next track, “Where do we go now?” has a slightly faster production and takes listeners down 24th street as she reminisces on moments that raised red flags in her relationship. Each verse builds on itself as Abrams explores the confusion and guilt surrounding her relationship. She reflects that “there’s nothin’ left here / all our best years are behind / what a brutal way to die /, but you chose it every time'.' Yet she ends her last verse with a spark of hope that maybe one day, she could meet her lover down the line when they both are healed.
Building on her soft acoustic guitar sound, “I should hate you” opens with the loneliness that can be felt after a breakup. Abrams’s loneliness seeps into a meditation about how the effort put into her relationship often felt one-sided. The track transforms within itself through angry lyrical shifts and a build-up of drums as the final chorus kicks in. “And I swear to god I’d kill you / If I loved you less hard,” Abrams sings with a heartbreaking mix of desperation and disappointment. The following track, “Will you cry?” takes a similar reflective, acoustic approach. “Would it not kill to say goodbye?” Abrams asks as she cradles her heart through the album’s sixth track.
At the heart of the album, “Amelie'' stands out as a song that moves away from the topic of breakups and transitions listeners into a more contemplative, ambiguous track. Instead of being directed toward a breakup, Abrams builds the character of her “Amelie.” She longingly repeats, “Where did you go, Amelie / Amelie, Amelie, where’d you do?” Filled with yearning, she asks, “were you all in a dream?” The eighth track, “Difficult,” brings listeners back to the same struggles that were explored in the first track. The track continues to explore the effects that concluding a relationship can have on one’s mental health and the larger problems that can stem from it. With a faster and louder sound, Abrams lets out, “I guess I’m just difficult,” “If I move out this year, I’ll feel my parents slippin’,” and “I’ve been speakin’ / To my therapist, I call her every weekend.”
Taking a more thematic approach, “This is what the drugs are for” talks about the way that escapism is used to cope with heartache. “You painted my life indigo / A kind of blue I hate to know / Where everything turns kind of cold,” Abrams sings and ultimately fractures the sense of the first verse where she admits that she still thinks about her ex often. “Fault line” uses the imagery of something cracked, broken, and irreparable to portray her relationship. Delicately, she ends with the lyric, “I know you’re a fault line / But I’ll break too.”
As the album nears its ending, “The blue” is bittersweet in its yearning after the past. Lyrics such as “You came out of the blue like that / I could’ve never seen you coming / I think you’re everything I wanted” provide a contrast from other tracks. “The blue” is a simple narrative love song that Abrams paints tragic with her melancholic vocals. “Right now” finishes the album with dreamy piano and homesick lyrics. With lyrics that long after the mundane images from home, like “the light in the kitchen / From the fridge on the floor” and “the faint overhearing / Of my mom on the phone,” Abrams writes through the pain of growing up and moving on. As she steers the album to its conclusion, Abrams leaves her past life behind her, and begins to heal from the experiences she endured throughout the previous tracks. She alludes that better days are on the horizon when she concludes her debut album with the lyrics, “Think I’m more alive somehow / I feel like myself right now.”