Gracie Abrams for Perfect Issue 11.<\/p>\n
Photographer: Daniel Jackson
Fashion Editor: Katie Grand<\/p>\n
Writer: Bryan Yambao<\/p>\n
I was in Sitges, Spain, on the beach, without my laptop, which is not the ideal way to discover that Gracie Abrams and Jennie had been waiting for me on Zoom for six minutes.<\/p>\n
The original interview time had changed and I had saved the wrong time zone in my calendar, because this is how empires fall. There had been a Google Meet, then a Zoom, then technical issues, then me: moderator, fan and idiot, holding my phone in the sun like a man FaceTiming his dentist.<\/p>\n
And then there they were. Gracie and Jennie. Two mega music stars on my phone screen while I tried to look like a professional adult.<\/p>\n
You can know the songs. You can have listened to Gracie in private, to Jennie and BLACKPINK at full volume. Still, when they are suddenly there, waiting for you, the fan in you does not die. It just learns to sit upright.<\/p>\n
For Perfect, the premise was simple and slightly surreal: Jennie would ask Gracie the questions. What followed was less interview than recognition: two women who clearly understood each other before the first proper question had landed.<\/p>\n
Gracie Abrams has always made music that feels almost too close. From minor to The Secret of Us, she has written from a place people try to tidy up before anyone sees it. Her songs often sound as if they have arrived five minutes after something happened, still warm and undignified by hindsight.<\/p>\n
But when she speaks about her new project, Daughter from Hell, something shifts. The feeling is still there. So are the nerves. This time, they are not driving the car.<\/p>\n
\u2018I feel like, because I\u2019m the oldest I\u2019ve ever been, I have more perspective than I ever have before,\u2019 she says. \u2018My whole life, I\u2019ve been very used to turning to songwriting when something has felt particularly overwhelming or negative\u2026 like I needed to rush to get this thing down. Weirdly for this album, I didn\u2019t feel so manic.\u2019<\/p>\n
Jennie understands the machinery from the inside. She knows what it means to be styled, lit, choreographed and still searching for the person inside the performance. She tells Gracie there is always an \u2018in-between balance\u2019 between the production and the self, a question of how to bring more of the real person into the music, the performance, the room.<\/p>\n
Their friendship began in the usual absurd way these things sometimes do: not at the beginning. They first crossed paths years ago at Kendall Jenner\u2019s Halloween birthday, briefly, in passing, and only \u2018linked-linked\u2019, as Jennie puts it, much later. The real moment came backstage at Billboard Women in Music in 2025 \u2013 Jennie winning the Global Force Award, Gracie winning Songwriter of the Year \u2013 where they held hands and recognised something.<\/p>\n
\u2018She felt like a friend,\u2019 Jennie says. \u2018She was so genuine with me from the moment that we met.\u2019 Then came the line that quietly defined the whole conversation: \u2018There is no wall between her and reality, which is so rare to find in my experience in life.\u2019<\/p>\n
Both women kept circling the same problem: how to bring a real self into a highly produced life. BLACKPINK live, Gracie says, is \u2018the equivalent of a human firework show\u2019 \u2013 a finale every song, no low energy, no place to hide. That is where glamour starts to look less like fantasy and more like stamina.<\/p>\n
Daughter from Hell arrived after Gracie stepped out of her own cycle. After years of touring, she had six months off the road. \u2018My nervous system was regulating to a day that didn\u2019t end with being on stage in front of a bunch of people,\u2019 she says.<\/p>\n
She had not planned to make another album so soon. \u2018I wasn\u2019t anticipating having an album for another year or two,\u2019 she says. \u2018I wanted the downtime to live my life off tour and figure out what it is I wanted to say.\u2019 But life, inconveniently, started speaking.<\/p>\n
The title came last.<\/p>\n
Daughter from Hell began as a song to Gracie\u2019s mother, Katie McGrath: part letter, part apology, part thank-you. The older Gracie gets, the more horrified she becomes by what she put her parents through: the sneaking around, the childish assumption that adults cannot see what they are already seeing.<\/p>\n
\u2018I just admire my mom so much,\u2019 she says, \u2018how decent and generous and full of grace she is.\u2019 The song became an unravelling of her fear and shame that she might never reach her mother\u2019s level. \u2018I fell in love with the term \u201cdaughter from hell\u201d as soon as I wrote the song,\u2019 she says. It became the thesis for the album.<\/p>\n
There was also a joke buried in the basement. Grace\u2019s friends and collaborators Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon once nicknamed her \u2018the basement lady\u2019 because of the low, layered vocals she recorded \u2018in this kind of demonic way\u2019. When Daughter from Hell appeared, the nickname suddenly made sense. Daughter from hell. Basement lady. Same family. Different staircase.<\/p>\n
The album, she says, feels more spacious than her earlier work. Not happier. Just less reactive. \u2018I think I just let them flow through me without feeling so deeply attached to an extreme good or an extreme bad,\u2019 she says. Most importantly, she can hear herself in it. \u2018I do recognise myself in all of it,\u2019 she says. \u2018Which is a relief.\u2019<\/p>\n
Relief is not decorative. In pop, the self can become a costume other people keep asking you to put back on. Gracie talks about the \u2018thin veil\u2019 of performance: getting dressed, going out, and becoming what people have paid to see, even when the private self is nowhere near ready.<\/p>\n
\u2018I\u2019m trying to integrate the parts of myself,\u2019 she says. \u2018If there\u2019s a day where in my personal life the last thing you could imagine doing is getting in an outfit and going out and being who your fans expect, I\u2019m trying to allow the parts that feel not ready for that to still be present.\u2019<\/p>\n
Jennie understands immediately. Being on stage, she says, gives them a strange privilege: the chance to sing from somewhere private and watch it become visible in real time. In everyday life, \u2018You don\u2019t really get to see yourself so vulnerably,\u2019 she says. On stage, the feeling has nowhere to hide.<\/p>\n
Gracie sees touring as an antidote to the isolating aspects of modern life: phones, heads down, everyone sealed inside their own private glass. \u2018There is nothing less cynical than rooms of thousands of people, or a hundred people, however big or small, choosing to be together and to sing together,\u2019 she says.<\/p>\n
Chanel brought them into the same frame. In Coco Crush, the short film released by the house at the start of the year, the edit makes them look as if they are in the same space at the same time. When I ask about this, both of them giggle: \u2018We weren\u2019t even together,\u2019 Gracie says. By the Met Gala, the frame had become real: they were seated together, and the New York blur became, as Gracie puts it, \u2018a 48-hour hang\u2019.<\/p>\n
Gracie credits much of that atmosphere to Mathieu Blazy. \u2018The magic of Chanel does come from the top down,\u2019 she says. Around him are women with individuality, ease and self-knowledge: the sort of knowing you cannot fake.<\/p>\n
Daughter from Hell is a title with teeth, but underneath it is an album about moving through your twenties with all the loneliness, self-scrutiny, transitions and emotional reckoning of that decade. It is about trying to turn the feelings you would rather hide from into something that makes both the artist and the listener feel less alone.<\/p>\n
The title may look back at the chaos. But the songs point forwards, towards a Gracie Abrams who is no longer only writing from the wound, but from the strange, generous place where the wound starts to become light.<\/p>\n
This story was taken from Perfect Issue 11, the Zeitgeist Issue. The issue is available to pre-order now and will begin shipping from 15 September.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gracie Abrams for Perfect Issue 11. Photographer: Daniel JacksonFashion Editor: Katie Grand Writer: Bryan Yambao I was in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":594316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-594315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=594315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/594316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=594315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=594315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=594315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}