By Annabel Ross and Tom W. Clarke
Gracie Abrams’ The Secret of Us: a deep-dive into love, intimacy and emotional dependence.
Gracie Abrams, The Secret of Us
On her second full-length record, Gracie Abrams has crafted one of the best pop albums of 2024 so far – and one that feels destined to become a seminal Gen Z breakup record.
On The Secret of Us, Abrams flexes her natural talent for storytelling and lyricism, while reining in the impulses that occasionally led her first album, Good Riddance, to veer too far into the sophomoric and morose. The result is a narratively driven, cohesive and engrossing series of songs that draw the listener into the slow, painful end of a relationship unravelling before it truly began.
Abrams, the daughter of famed TV showrunner and Star Trek director J.J. Abrams, is most often compared to the likes of Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift, both of whom she has accompanied on their recent tours. In a coup highlighting Abrams’ growing profile, Swift even cameos on Us, a track omitted from preview streams sent to reviewers, lest it leak prematurely.
While primarily produced by regular Swift accomplice Aaron Dessner of The National – who also produced and co-wrote Abrams’ debut – the 24-year-old’s music hedges far closer to sharp-edged indie artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Billie Eilish, with her spartan production allowing her words to take centre stage.
Because while The Secret of Us is beautifully melodic, her greatest strength is her lyrics. Not one for dense metaphor or flowery poetry, Abrams is direct and uncompromising and often delightfully surprising. She can be intense and sardonic, as on Felt Good About You (“Got what you demanded, picture perfect like you planned it”), or authentic and dreamy, as on Let It Happen (“I might barely know you, but still don’t love you yet, but probably will, turn me into something tragic”). She always chooses the most interesting next word, disarming and charming with unexpected turns of phrase.
The Taylor Swift acolyte, and daughter of Hollywood showrunner and filmmaker J.J. Abrams, has crafted one of the year’s best pop releases.
Opening track Felt Good About You sets the scene – like Shakespeare kicking off Romeo and Juliet with a prologue that succinctly draws our attention to everything that will go wrong over the course of the story – and later tracks like Tough Love and Normal Thing reconstruct the final moments of her “sure-fire train wreck”, a forensic report in the aftermath of an emotional collapse.
Lead single Risk is the album’s poppiest moment, an up-tempo, clever and insightful bop with a hook that will have you shouting from the driver’s seat. But listeners reeled in by Risk might be surprised by what else awaits them as they delve deeper.
The album’s best song is I Love You, I’m Sorry – a gorgeously constructed masterclass in pop storytelling, featuring Abrams’ most crystallised and enchanting vocal performance and emotionally vibrant lyricism, reminiscent of Boygenius at their best. It’s deeply intimate and beguilingly relatable, hyper specific but somehow universal.
The second single and album closer Close to You is probably the album’s weakest moment – the closest thing The Secret of Us comes to a dance banger but one that doesn’t fit with the album’s sound and themes and feels quite literally tacked onto the end.
Ultimately, The Secret of Us is a long-form post-mortem of a relationship, its slow erosion and snap ending. It’s a deep dive, a detailed exploration of love, intimacy, emotional dependence, and the way things sometimes just end before we think they will. Abrams is meditative, working through her emotional journey with the curiosity of a scientist and the reflective clarity of an artist. Tom W. Clarke
Peggy Gou, I Hear You
Peggy Gou is a phenomenon. Born in South Korea and based in Berlin, the 32-year-old is one of the biggest DJs on the planet, having graced stages everywhere from Coachella to Primavera Sound to Berghain to Ibiza to the late Virgil Abloh’s Off White fashion show.
Peggy Gou’s I Hear You: The superstar DJ eyes global domination.
Gou’s turning point came in 2017, when her set at Glastonbury Festival was deemed so good that revellers raised one shoe in the air in that Australian sign of approval that’s been adopted at music festivals around the world. She’s since released EPs on Ninja Tune, started her own label, Gudu Records, contributed a mix to !K7’s illustrious DJ Kicks series, and started her own fashion line.
Her debut album has been years in the making and comes out on XL, home to superstar artists such as Adele, the XX, and Thom Yorke. Gou’s already huge — she has over 4 million followers on Instagram and more than 10 million on TikTok — but with I Hear You, she’s trying to go supernova. Fans will be familiar with some of these songs already (one was released as far back as 2021), but this isn’t such an issue when the new music is just as strong.
The most obvious bid for the charts is I Believe in Love Again, a cruisily paced pop-house collaboration with Lenny Kravitz. Unfortunately, it’s also the worst track on the album. There are no guitars, which seems to defeat the purpose of bringing in the axe hero, and Kravitz’s falsetto here is non-distinctive and unconvincing. As a child, Gou apparently idolised him and you can’t blame her for the flex, but there’s more fun to be had elsewhere.
The agreeable tropi-house of All That, featuring Puerto Rican artist Villano Antillano rapping in Spanish, is a much better crossover track (and a likely play for Gou’s South American fans). (It Goes Like) Nanana shamelessly borrows the synth riff from ’90s trance anthem 9pm (Til I Come), but Gou’s catchy, sing-song vocals and an infectious, bouncing beat make it her own.
Even better is Lobster Telephone, hitching Gou’s Korean vocals to a tinkling arpeggio synth, cascading chimes and a peppy bassline, and Seoulsi Peggy Gou, another artful fusion of her heritage and club music that layers the Korean stringed instrument gayageum over drum & bass beats.
Chart hits, festival slots, a fashion line, and finally a debut album – South Korean DJ Peggy Gou is a phenomenon.Credit: Park Jong Ha
Purple Horizon invokes Madchester-era acid house, with diva vocal snatches, lush piano and a cinematic build to soundtrack sunlight streaming through warehouse windows at the end of a big night. But the purest club track of all is 1+1=11, a chugging instrumental house epic that splices break beats with radiant keys in a triumphant album finale.
Like many beautiful, successful women, Gou has attracted a lot of hate along with the high praise, some of it not entirely unearned. She continued to perform throughout the pandemic at what were dubbed “plague raves”, or superspreader events; her private jet activity gets her mentioned in articles with titles such as “The Celebs Setting Fire to the Planet”; and she happily accepts eye-watering offers to play in contentious destinations, such as at Saudi Arabia’s Soundstorm Festival. “If there’s people who want to hear my music, I will go,” she told i-D magazine in 2020. “I don’t give a f---.”
Some might argue it’s precisely the kind of attitude that’s required for global domination, and I Hear You feels perfectly pitched to meet that end.
Strategic but edgy and unique enough to fend off cynicism, it’s the most fulsome blueprint yet of the signature Gou sound. Considering her track record and outsized influence across music, fashion and social media, we can expect to hear it blossoming in every corner of the globe. Annabel Ross
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