Days of Gracie

After dodging toxic fans, 'nepo baby' jibes and her own projectile vomit, pop star Gracie Abrams explains why she's writing about our uncertain future

- Alexis Petridis

On a video call from a hotel room in Hamburg, Germany, Gracie Abrams is expounding on the virtues of decoupling yourself from social media. "You can literally do so much when you're not scrolling!" she says. "You can retain more information; everything gets lighter. You have a greater capacity to be more present, to be there for the people in your life, to read a book that's going to inspire your next album, or go on a hike and breathe air instead of sitting in a dark room on fucking Instagram. I'm doing lots of, like, tactile stuff, staying off social media," she adds. "Needlepoint and shit like that. I'm just trying to make things... to have some tangible evidence of having lived this year." Of course, this is nothing the world hasn't heard before.

Still, it feels like an intriguing statement coming from Abrams. For one thing, her single That's So True spent most of January at No 1 in the UK: it spent most of November and December there as well, took a brief Christmas holiday, then reappeared to beat Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga et al once more. Her album The Secret of Us also reached No 1, and is now enjoying its 18th consecutive week in the Top 20.

It's the same story at home in the US, where The Secret of Us has spent 35 weeks on the charts: her previous album managed two. Abrams is calling from Hamburg because it's the latest stop on a global tour that's been filling vast arenas for months and is scheduled to keep doing so until August.

Her rise seems particularly bound up with social media.

She broke through in 2020, with I Miss You, I'm Sorry: a viral lockdown hit with its cheerfully amateurish, bedroombound video and lyrics that seemed to fit the prevalent mood. She already had a major label deal, but was initially famed for directly interacting with her audience online: responding to their comments, sending them DMs, referring to them not as her fans but her "friends".