![]() This Friday Abrams returns with This Is What It Feels Like, a full-length that is being billed as a “project” so that she can become more famous before releasing her “debut album.” It continues to mine the sonic and emotional territory heard on minor, broadening it slightly with pivots like the pristinely rustic “Rockland,” on which she recruited Dessner to go full folklore, and the Haim-esque “The Bottom,” a jaunty little self-loathing ditty on which she declares, “I’m going to drag you right down to the bottom.” (Also: “I’m happier when I’m sad.”) The pulsing “For Real This Time” is a better Lorde song than anything Lorde released this year, while “Augusta” taps into a whispery acoustic vibe similar to what Clairo was doing on this year’s Sling. “Hate to picture you half-drunk, happy/ Hate to think you went out without me,” she sings on the loosely dance-y but still deeply melancholy “21.” Her later lyric “I still haven’t heard from your family, but you said your mom always loved me” has big “How Bout Now” energy. (Bridgers and her apparent boyfriend, actor Paul Mescal, are also among Abrams’ admirers.) But Abrams’ lyrics remind me less of Bridgers’ darkly comic depression dispatches than of a less passive-aggressive Drake. There’s certainly some Phoebe Bridgers in the mix, so you could argue Rodrigo actually was influenced by Bridgers secondhand. minor is the sound of all those sad indie singer-songwriters of the past half-decade or so being subsumed into the mainstream pop aesthetic once and for all: breathy, quivering vocals, confessional lyrics about heartbreak, plaintive pianos and guitars, the occasional surprise electronic flourish. Theoretically, Abrams makes bedroom-pop, but that descriptor - which implies not just intimacy and minimalism but a homespun DIY simplicity - doesn’t really work for music this studio-slick. ![]() And in minor, you can certainly hear the blueprint for the sound that helped launch Rodrigo to superstardom. She’s released songs this year with big-time producers ranging from pop hit-maker Benny Blanco to the National’s Aaron Dessner. She’s become somewhat of a sensation in Hollywood, with endorsements from a long list of superstars including Swift, Lorde, Post Malone, Rosalía, and actor Nicholas Braun (aka Succession‘s Cousin Greg). But if Abrams had the connections to march into the heart of the music industry, she also appears to have the talent to hang. That knowledge might reasonably cause you to scoff and to slag off Abrams’ recording career as a rich kid’s vanity project. Abrams, the guy who co-created Lost and directed multiple films in both the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises. Admittedly, she did not exactly start from the bottom: Her father is J.J. I literally just drove around my neighborhood listening to it for like an hour, and I was so moved that I went home and I wrote this song, which I really love, that is very much inspired by her style of songwriting.”Ībrams is not yet Olivia-Rodrigo-famous, but she’s been enjoying a rapid rise of her own. Rather, she said the song was directly indebted to minor, the 2020 EP from Gracie Abrams. ![]() ![]() But Rodrigo herself did not cite the influence of Phoebe Bridgers, Billie Eilish, or even her self-professed idols Taylor Swift and Lorde. When Olivia Rodrigo took over the world with “drivers license” at the top of 2021, critics like me scrambled to point out reference points for the trembling piano ballad, which simultaneously felt traditional and in step with the bedroom-pop zeitgeist. ![]()
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