Gracie Abrams has seemingly gone through a lot of breakups in her 24 years. Either that, or her relationships were an emotional rollercoaster.
The Secret of Us takes listeners on an emotionally charged ride on that rollercoaster, climbing the hills of love (or lust) and flying down the other side into bitterness, regret and—only very occasionally—acceptance.
Abrams is often quite vulnerable. And with that trait come some poignant truths and hopeful emotions.
“Risk” and “Let It Happen” acknowledge the risks that come with jumping into a new relationship.
In “I Love You, I’m Sorry,” Abrams reveals that not every broken relationship has to end in jealousy or hate. She truly wants healing between herself and her ex, singing, “Two summers from now, we’ll have been talking, but not all that often, we’re cool now.” In the same song, she is willing to admit her own faults in the relationship (“I’m wrong again, wrong again”).
“Good Luck Charlie” encourages her best friend’s ex-boyfriend to also take personal responsibility (“And now it all comes down to you”).
In “I Knew It, I Know You,” Abrams sings “We could talk, we could get it, we could both calm down.” She is also willing to work out a broken relationship in “Free Now,” saying, “If you find yourself out, if there is a right time, chances are I’ll be here, we could share a lifeline.”
In other songs (“Felt Good About You,” “Blowing Smoke,” “Gave You I, Gave You I”), she’s more than willing to let her exes go for their failures. In “Tough Love,” Abrams sings about learning that her friends are cooler, smarter and tougher and so there’s “no chance I waste my 20s on random men.”
The album is very vulnerable, and with that comes some mature topics and unhealthy attitudes.
While never explicitly sexual, Abrams gets very suggestive in a few songs. In “Felt Good About You” she sings, “You felt nice for a bad decision.” In “Blowing Smoke” she sings, “But I still hate the image of you kissing her,” and, “Tell me if she takes you far.” And the final song “Close to You” is all about her burning desire for a man. (“And now your mouth is moving, cinematic timing. You pull me in and touch my neck, and now I’m dying.”)
In “Normal Thing,” Abrams normalizes fantasizing over impossible relationships with celebrities.
Abrams is also quite hypocritical in two of her songs. In “Blowing Smoke,” she criticizes an ex for lowering his standards (“If she’s got a pulse, she meets your standards now”). But three songs later in “Let it Happen,” Abrams sings that she “had a backbone made of glass and then it broke” and that she “might break the windows, let myself back in,” signifying her own willingness to lower her standards for this man as she fantasizes about being with him.
It seems as if Abrams often has one of two responses to her exes. Either she hates them and the thought of them being with anyone else, or she misses them and hopes they are thinking about her. That’s the case in the song “us,” featuring Taylor Swift, when they sing, “I felt it, you held it, do you miss us, us?”
Either way, there is rarely a repenting attitude to her songs. The closest we hear is in “Felt Good About You” when she admits, “All my friends, they tried to stop me wanting you, but I was never meant to listen, not until I found a reason.” Mostly we hear an attitude similar to that in “I Knew It, I Know You” when she sings “I can’t pretend that I’m sorry when I’m not sorry.”
“Tough Love” talks about getting intoxicated and “Normal Thing” talks about being “stoned.”
Four songs on the album are marked explicit and have some harsh language often in the bridges. “Risk” which is not marked with the explicit tag missuses God’s name seven times throughout the choruses, and we also hear “d–n” once.
From start to finish, we hear one f-word, 3 s-words, two uses of “d—k,” as well as “h—” and “d–n” each once.
Gracie Abrams is often uttered in the same breath as Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo. Listening to her newest album, that makes sense (and not just because Swift is featured on “us.”).
While The Secret of Us is in-keeping with the way relationships are vulnerably and creatively presented in modern pop, the “lessons” aren’t great.
And though it’s not always easy to cleanly separate autobiographical elements from fictional storytelling, Abrams believes what she sings. In a 2020 interview with L’Officiel, she said, “I can’t separate my music from my opinions.”
There is not a song that doesn’t talk about fantasizing lust or heartbreak, and many heartbreak songs are full of jealousy, regret, and sometimes outright hate.
Add in some profanity and some suggestive lyrics and this might not be a great choice for your family’s next road trip.
Caleb Gottry is the Plugged In intern for Summer 2024. Caleb studies journalism with a minor in music at Texas Christian University, where he will be a junior in the fall. He loves playing with words, listening to and making music, and spending any spare time with friends or family.
