After dodging toxic fans, ‘nepo baby’ jibes and her own projectile vomit, the 25-year-old has just spent eight weeks at UK No 1. She explains why she’s now writing about our dark, uncertain future
On a video call from a hotel room in Hamburg, Gracie Abrams is expounding on the virtues of decoupling yourself from social media and living a life offline. “You can literally do so much when you’re not scrolling!” she enthuses. “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: we’re well used to being told about the benefits of a digital detox. Still, it feels like an intriguing statement coming from Gracie 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, the kind of longevity only afforded to those artists who have broken through into the upper echelons of pop stardom.
