Across the parking lot at the Rustic Canyon Recreation Center, Gracie Abrams is kneeling in the grass next to her long-haired dachshund, Weenie. It’s a quiet Friday afternoon in Los Angeles, and we’re the only two people in the lot, so she’s easy to spot. She hurries toward me in cargo pants, a sweatshirt that says “BUG” in block letters, and a navy Red Sox cap covering her dark brown pixie cut.

Her casual dog-walking look almost makes Abrams, 26, pass for a college student visiting her parents on break. You could, for at least a second, forget that she’s a global, Grammy-nominated pop star who counts Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and Lorde among her biggest champions.

In some ways, she kind of is a kid home for a quick visit. Abrams spends time in London now, with her boyfriend, the actor Paul Mescal. Her parents, filmmaker J.J. Abrams and producer Katie McGrath, raised Gracie and her two brothers near here, in the Pacific Palisades. They used to bring her to Rustic Canyon every Friday to hang with parents they met through Mommy & Me classes. Abrams tells me she still has friends from those days and is determined to soak up as much time as possible—with them, with her parents, and with Weenie.

Perhaps Weenie most of all, who has been waylaid in LA. “There are so many papers,” she laments, unhooking his leash as we sit on a shady bench. “Paul’s desperate to get him out to London.” Abrams’s parents have stepped in to take care of him—which, she’ll admit, is probably a good thing. Even her time in LA has been hectic. Just the Sunday before, she was on Mescal’s arm at the Oscars, dressed in a glittering, black, midriff-baring two-piece ensemble from Chanel. They could both be seen screaming enthusiastically for Mescal’s Hamnet costar Jessie Buckley as she won best actress.

Chaos is something Abrams has grown accustomed to. Eight years ago, she arrived in New York as a first-year student at Barnard with a cult fandom she’d fostered through Instagram, where she posted videos performing songs from her bedroom. A year later she’d dropped out to pursue music full-time, signing to Interscope and releasing a debut EP, Minor, in July 2020. This was the height of the pandemic, and her aching, sincere songs connected with many people who were yearning for aching, sincere music. When the world reopened, Abrams embarked on her first tour in late 2021, put out a second EP, This Is What It Feels Like, and joined Olivia Rodrigo (already an avowed fan) on her Sour dates that following spring.

Things spun even faster in 2023. Her debut album, Good Riddance—16 tracks of guileless, hyper-delicate pop—came out in February. Two months later, she joined Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, opening 49 dates of that globe-spanning stadium trek. By the end of 2024, Abrams had been nominated for a best-new-artist Grammy and had released what would become her sophomore breakthrough: The Secret of Us. It was a more forceful statement, still folk-inflected, still heart-on-sleeve, but threaded through with pop hooks that had newfound confidence. Touring behind it, she filled arenas.

She finally took a breather last summer. “There’s been such quiet,” she says, with noticeable relief. “It’s not until you stop that you realize ‘Oh, I haven’t seen my friends in a long time. I haven’t cooked a meal in a long time.’ The sleep schedule becomes regular for the first time in, like, four years.”

Eventually, she found her way, as she had before, to upstate New York’s Long Pond Studio, the famed hub of her closest collaborator, the producer and musician Aaron Dessner, and the place where the two of them had written and recorded both of her albums. Abrams first met Dessner as a fan of his band The National. “Growing up with him has felt like being plugged into some electrical force,” Abrams says. “And also like standing in a river and just feeling actual calm.”

Her raw affection for Dessner is as much for his talent in the studio as it is for the quiet life he’s built in the Hudson Valley. “The way that he’s navigated the industry was something I felt really moved by, living in the middle of nowhere and having a family and friends. It was a huge relief to see an example of someone who had a career and was also able to achieve some kind of holistic balance.”

Dessner knew what Abrams needed. “A lot of pressure comes with the spotlight and constant touring,” he says. “Gracie handles it quite well, but it takes a toll on anyone. I think at some point it just became a little bit overwhelming.” He advised that there was no rush to follow up her last album. Abrams wasn’t even sure she had much else to say. “I felt talked out,” she admits.

Abrams had spent her career writing about being insecure within relationships, channeling her feelings into songs. (Prior boyfriends, she says, typically heard her honest thoughts only as song lyrics.) Now, in her relationship with Mescal, she was talking more openly, communicating in a healthy way. Was there anything left for songwriting? “I was worried feeling secure and stable was threatening my drive to write music,” Abrams says. “It freaked me out.”

Eventually she and Dessner unlocked something new—without needing a dramatic reinvention. “I have learned from Aaron that it’s okay to mine deeper and refine what you are naturally inclined to do, even if that looks less shiny and new on the outside,” she says. Dessner’s own career was an inspiration. “There’s something about longevity that I really hope to continue chipping away at.”

So she did mine deeper, reckoning with the kind of girl she’d been—a tornado child who wreaked havoc at home then had to come of age quickly on stages for thousands to see. The sessions started and ended at Long Pond, and in the end she had Daughter from Hell, a portrait of who she was and where she is now.

The songs sound like her: earnest, introspective, folk-informed. But the production is more lush, deepened by orchestration, and big enough to fit the rooms she’s playing now. To Abrams, the album, which is out in July, is “the sum of all my parts,” she says. “It feels like me in progress.”

“That’s the actual daughter from hell,” Abrams says, anxiously watching Weenie interact with a new dog who has entered our shady spot. We’ve been talking only for the better part of an hour, but Abrams has already poured out the story of her past few years with a startling degree of candor.

Abrams is a naturally open person. Of late, in photo dumps and Stories, she’s shared sweet photos of hanging out with Mescal at Glastonbury and celebrated the hard work he and the Hamnet cast and crew put into the film. She tells me she was with him in London during much of the Hamnet shoot, spending evenings together after long days on set, discussing the material he worked on. “It feels like every day you come home and read the greatest book ever—that’s what it’s like to be in conversation with someone making something like that,” she says. She describes director Chloé Zhao and his costar Buckley as “witches”—high praise. “The person you love gets to be surrounded by witches,” she says. “It’s magical.”

Meanwhile, Mescal bought Abrams a 1960s reel-to-reel and helped her record on it. Mescal is a capable guitar player and has gotten better prepping to be Paul McCartney in Sam Mendes’s planned Beatles biopics. “So much better than I’ve ever been,” she admits. Every room in their home is filled with instruments, including a Bechstein piano that Abrams would start most mornings with.

Abrams tells me she’s picked up pastel drawing and FaceTimes her mom four times a day. The gravitational pull toward settling down comes from the kind of life she’s been leading. The relentlessness had been too much. She pushed through bad days on the road, pushed past exhaustion, and often past her limits. “I just wasn’t listening to myself all that much,” she says.

The new album’s lead single, “Hit the Wall,” allowed Abrams to channel feelings of reaching her physical and emotional limit. Anthemic and big, this is an arena pop banger that suits Abrams’s rock star mode. It’s also diaristic and detailed—a personal reminder to find the calm before crashing out. “If you’re not listening to the parts of yourself that are sounding the alarm and asking for attention,” she says, “then inevitably it erupts in some other way.”

Abrams spent her early 20s building a bachelorette life between both coasts. Her first stint in Manhattan was brief: the abandoned degree at Barnard (where she’d intended to study international relations). In 2023, she moved into an LA apartment with her best friend, TV-writer-turned-pop star Audrey Hobert.

Hobert and Abrams, one year apart, had met all the way back at Abrams’s fifth-grade graduation, courtesy of their mutual friend Clem (currently living near Abrams in London). “I was walking into the bathroom; she was walking out of the bathroom,” Hobert remembers of their adolescent meet-cute. “She was in white high-top Converse, and I stopped her. I was like, ‘I wore white high-top Converse to my graduation.’ The rest is history.”

Abrams and Hobert bonded over music in middle school—sneaking into classrooms to play guitar, singing Ed Sheeran on the bus. Abrams had already started writing songs, but only in her bedroom. That changed in high school, as Hobert made early attempts at movie scripts. Each encouraged the other. “We were always very in sync,” Hobert says. And then Abrams posted songs online and started to feel the relief of forming a community.

“I remember what it felt like when a stranger would find a song I’d posted to Instagram. It was surreal,” Abrams says. “That sounds absolutely mentally ill, but I loved it,” she says. Posting online “didn’t require me to confront anybody on the other side,” she adds. An experience akin to writing in her journal. “I loved how impulsive I felt with my songs.”

By 2023, Abrams’s career was in full swing; Hobert worked as a staff writer on Nickelodeon’s The Really Loud House. And the pair started writing music, converting the frantic energy of their lives, lived between LA and Long Pond and Electric Lady Studios on the East Coast, into songs. “I feel like you have these premonitions that are attached to relationships,” Hobert says, “where it’s like, ‘This is something greater than.’ That is how I’ve always felt with Gracie.”

Abrams and Hobert collaborated on much of The Secret of Us. They also have another collaboration on Daughter from Hell: “Minibar,” one of the earliest songs made for the album. “It’s really fun,” Hobert says. “It’s not about some ailment in any one of our lives. It’s what it’s like to hang out with Gracie.”

Hobert had her own songs to write too. These would fill her 2025 debut album, Who’s the Clown?, which Abrams adores and which Hobert has been touring behind. “I was lucky enough to grow up my whole childhood with her voice in my head,” Abrams says. “She always knew herself so well and was such a lighthouse in my life.” To see her friend ascend “has been the joy of my life.”

As a kid, Abrams “always chased what made me feel electrocuted,” she says. She was the middle child, between a “very tender and gentle” older brother and a younger brother who “learned what not to do” from his sister. She says she did “things that now keep me up at night.  I got good at sneaking around—not just out of the house, but with some of my behavior too.”

“Gracie often acted older than her actual age,” her mom tells me. “She had a confidence that seemed authentic—and it sometimes was—but I think it was also a cover for some deep insecurity.” Journaling was a constant for Abrams, and one day in high school McGrath stumbled on opened pages left on her daughter’s bed. “Less than a page in, I stopped and never looked again,” she says. “It was her safe space and her hiding spot and it wasn’t my business. I had such a strong sense that I needed to trust her even when she worried me—and there were times when she really worried me.”

As Abrams was finishing up her album, she texted her mom an apology. “I was like, ‘Shit, I really was a terrorist. I really took years off [your life], didn’t I?’ And she was just like, ‘Absolutely.’ ”

All of that went into the Daughter from Hell. The title track is an apology of sorts. “I wish I could go back and spend all of the time that I spent fighting my mom just listening to every drop of wisdom she has for me,” Abrams says. “I feel so aware of how quickly time’s moving right now, and that makes me nervous sometimes.”

So does the internet—that formerly safe space that’s recently seemed much less safe. Abrams’s phone is free of social media apps. She’s not interested in jokes at her expense and the dismissals that flood platforms like X and Instagram. She’s a child of Hollywood who didn’t earn her music career. She can’t sing. Once algorithms started serving her that sort of “cruelty,” as she puts it, she began to opt out.

They’re all thoughts she’s already had about herself. Abrams isn’t coy about any of this: She seems to know exactly who she is and what she wants to be. “I’m the first to say I’m not a vocalist,” she tells me. She never had any training, and her whispery quiet comes from years of not wanting anyone in her house to hear what she was doing. “I understand not liking how my voice sounded. I didn’t either a lot of the time….” She has worked to strengthen her singing and it’s paid off on the new album, where she often belts lines—a sound fuller and warmer than ever.

Abrams sets the trolling she’s faced against the onslaught of actual news—harrowing updates that clamor for her attention. As the child of proudly progressive parents, she’s always been vocal about her politics. She spoke out about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, performed alongside Kamala Harris during her run for president, and has posted about the plight of Palestinian children in Gaza. The state of the country and the current leadership in Washington weigh on her. “Being a citizen right now is so dark,” she says. “This country is a great experiment, and I think it’s aching so hard right now.”

A few days later it’s a damp New York spring morning, and Abrams is bundled up against the weather in a black turtleneck. She’s waiting for me at the Chelsea Hotel, her pixie cut pinned back delicately with two barrettes.

She and Dessner have been finalizing the mixes for her new album at Electric Lady Studios a few subway stops south. She orders a black coffee and a fruit plate for us to share, and sketches out her extended musical family tree. There’s Dessner’s twin brother, Bryce, who composed orchestrations on the album. “The concept of twins really blows my mind,” Abrams says. “They’re so brilliant and just felt so in sync. I’m like, ‘This has to be on a cellular level. Something is going on.’ ”

There’s Justin Vernon (a.k.a. Bon Iver) who came from Wisconsin to join Abrams and Dessner at Electric Lady for some of the “rowdiest” days of the album’s sessions. The producer Daniel Nigro pitched in from his Los Angeles base. Marcus Mumford sang on one of the tracks; even songwriter Sarah Aarons, who worked with Abrams back on her debut EP, makes an appearance.

“I think that growing up, there are these different checkpoints where you get to reflect on your village,” she explains. That village—a branching network of friendships—has opened up new endeavors for Abrams. The next thing is acting. She met filmmaker Halina Reijn three years ago over breakfast, when Reijn was looking for songwriters to contribute to her 2024 film, Babygirl.

“I totally forgot it was a business meeting,” Reijn says of this encounter. “I wanted to be her friend.” And when Reijn began writing her follow-up to Babygirl, the script for a film called Please, Abrams was “immediately” on her mind—this time to play the lead. Plot details are under wraps (the studio A24 will only tell me it’s “sexy and romantic”), but Reijn says it “provokes something all women can relate to,” and she was impressed with how Abrams connected in an audition. “She’s incredibly relatable,” Reijn says.

“This wasn’t something I imagined for myself,” Abrams says, “but every time I read the script it stimulates something in me.” Abrams has been prepping for the shoot (actors Tom Burke and David Jonsson have also been cast), reading a lot of plays, making playlists, and even writing music inspired by her character. “It sent me down a lot of rabbit holes that were dark and twisty,” she says.

And then it’s back to London where Mescal is waiting for her, deep in filming Mendes’s Beatles biopics. Her little brother is there too, now a student at Northeastern University and living with the couple during his semester abroad.

“I’ve had such a rampant imagination about the rest of my life,” she says. It’s more than just album, tour, album, tour. “I want consistent time to be with my people,” she says. “I want to be a mom, eventually.”

And she wants to keep creating. Maybe after Please it will be more films. Or poetry. Or theater, which she did in school and found thrilling. “I’m interested in being tested,” she says.

She’s open to it all. “I think about when I’m 85,” she says, “if I’m lucky enough to get there, I want to be able to look back and be like, ‘I did that weird thing.’ I want a full life.”

In this story: hair, Tamás Tüzes; makeup, Emi Kaneko; manicurist, Caroline Cotten; tailor, Irina Tshartaryan for Susie’s Custom Designs.

Produced by Hyperion. Set Design: Patience Harding.

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